Jocko Podcast 303: Always Look for New Information. The Psychology of Military Incompetence.

this is jocko podcast number 303 with carrie helton and me jocko willink good evening carrie good evening also joining us tonight is dave burke good evening dave good evening so dave i've been sitting on this for a while sitting on this book for a while i think i i think i've been sitting on it for almost a year almost a year i've been sitting on this book and i've been waiting for the right time to cover this book and i don't think there's a better time than right now the reason that i don't think there's a better time than right now you'll figure out as soon as i say the title of the book the title of the book is on the psychology on the psychology of military incompetence on the psychology of military incompetence and what does that mean well one thing it means is as we look at military leaders a lot of times people think oh this individual is in the military they must be awesome i mean look it happens a hundred percent in the seal community oh this guy was a seal he must be of the highest character must be an unbelievable leader must be a great runner right must be great at pull-ups and swimming must be the best shot right so so people make assumptions about the seal teams oh if you were sealed and you must be able to survive at a minimum of 78 days with you know nothing but a loin cloth and uh and a toothpick right that's that that's kind of you can you you you're picking up what i'm putting down right same thing happens with leadership you think oh this individual's in the in the military they made life and death decisions they must be incredible leaders and we can also attribute that to leaders in the past too well this person was a general this person was you know a military leader in the 1800s in the 1600s they must have military brilliance well this book disputes that not whole not not not as a whole and he makes a very important point and i had this discussion with jason gardner the other day after the afghanistan podcast jason's like well there's a lot of good leaders and i said yeah there absolutely are and i've worked for a lot of incredible leaders in the military but to blanket all leaders in the military and say oh they're in the military so they're awesome is a bad move and you can actually say throughout history there have been some really bad leaders and it's relatively consistent that you get bad military leaders bad senior military leaders so this is something i was interested in this book is written guy uh by a guy named dr norman f dixon and and i i don't really remember where i originally heard about the book it might have been one of the like algorithmic recommendations which do we hate the algorithm kind of but sometimes we're a little bit stoked about the algorithm so i might have been an algorithm it might have been maybe somebody recommended it to me but i look at it and obviously i like the military that's what this podcast is we do all kinds of military subjects on this podcast obviously i like psychology as well and the much of the jocko underground podcast we've covered a bunch of psychology but when it comes to military stuff i like military books that are written by military people not books that are written by theorists or even historians and academics that haven't been there so i don't normally like those kind of military books that are written by someone that was in the military so i wasn't sure if this book would make the grade then i did some research and here's the deal the author dr norman dixon mbe which is british-like thing most excellent order of british empire which you're given for your achievements in the arts and sciences he received his doctorate in philosophy in 1956 doctor of science 1972 1976 he was awarded sorry 1956 that's a 1956 doctrine in philosophy 1956 doctrine in philosophy doctor of science 1972 1976 awarded the university of london carpenter medal for quote work of exceptional distinction in experimental psychology right so the guy has some some clout bringing home some hardware he's bringing home some hardware he's a professor emeritus at of psychology at the university of university college of london authored other books besides this one one's called our own worst enemy kind of like that title another one called unconscious processing another one called subliminal perception so that's all impressive still wasn't sure if it made the grade but what tied it all together for me is that prior to all this stuff that he did he was in the british army from 1940 till 1950 and that means he fought in world war ii was wounded in world war ii wounded and this is a quote according to him he was wounded quote largely through my own incompetence which is we at least we're coming out of the gate with some humility which is nice but it gives it means his perspective is he has that perspective of a soldier of someone that's fought if someone that's been in combat then he can overlay that on his academic knowledge but the book is i mean you're going to see real quick that this book is pretty it's a pretty incredible book and and i don't know how many podcasts we'll do on it i'm assuming it'll be two maybe three um i don't know how much we'll even be able to get through get through today but with that i'm gonna start off with the forward of the book which is written by a guy named jeffrey walrow i hope i'm saying that right if not i apologize to jeffrey weiro professor of military history university of north texas director of their military history center and this is this is his his forward to the book which the reason i wanted to read the forward is because it starts to lay out the themes inside this book and you start to get an understanding of where this guy's coming from anything makes sense so far this is a book that i was burning through highlighters it's almost one of the books where you might as well just stop highlighting because you're highlighting everything so here we go the the forward to norm dixon's on the psychology of military incompetence norman dixon's on the psychology of military incompetence is a classic that should be read not because it is true in every detail but because it offers the military historian analyst or student an important method to discover and rank the manifold reason for military error and defeat that's a bold statement coming out of the gate he's saying the manifold reasons for military air and defeat are found in this book coming out of the gate strong and there's a couple notes in there not true in every detail the reason for that is the way the book is laid out it covers a lot of historical battles and wars and i think that i think that dixon was sensitive being an academic about the way historians would read it be like well actually that date is wrong and so he's he covers that himself too and says look ballpark we're in there this is what happened it's not and i didn't go and fact check everything but ballpark this is what happened so it's not a historical reference and he says that later continuing on dixon deploys psychological theory in a lucid accessible way and applies it in several case studies spanning the 19th century and 20th centuries he is in some ways constrained by chrono chronology the british officer types he scrutinizes are creatures of their age boris conservative and authoritarian and this authoritarian piece that he's talking about this may be the underlying theme of the book this authoritarian attitude and and personality type and what it means and what it does to you and what it does to your people continue on they went to stuffy boarding schools and endured tyrannical parents and school teachers they enlisted in a class system that expected snobbish conformity and yet the deeper you read into the book the more you realize that the specific circumstances of a raglan hague montgomery are less important than their lifelong enlistment in the military hierarchy that constrains and often warps behavior and you can see starting to throw out names raglan hey montgomery so that's what this book is he refers to individuals and shows what they did well what they did bad and he does cover good leaders as well at the heart of this book is a thesis that all can accept all human decision makers are victims of a chronic hazard that emotion and motivation unconsciously distort and bias all thought and perception right it's like crazy this is what we talk about all the time detached from your emotions you get distorted what do you write in ego clouds all decisions right that's what he's talking about man's needs biological social or neurotic act on his perception of the world around him and the decisions he makes no one in other words operates cleanly what a good thing to remember no one operates cleanly you all have it going on i did the underground podcast a while back and i talked about the fact that we're all insane and that is something the definition of insanity is that your world doesn't match reality and the fact of the matter is my world doesn't match your reality dave i know we're probably pretty freaking close because we work in the same job we have a similar background but there's no way that you see things exactly the way i see it right kerry you and i have a similar background but there's no way that we match up our realities don't match so that means we're all insane it's just a matter of what degree and that means everyone you interact with is kind of insane that means their reality is different than yours so when you're in a leadership position you're dealing with other people their reality is different than you so when you're making a decision and they hear that decision their reality is different than yours no one in other words operates cleanly singleness of mind a key ingredient of successful command is always under siege by doubt worries and distractions we all churn through a sludge of life experiences that have formed us and left us with key strengths and weaknesses the challenge for military commanders is all the greater because the stakes of their decisions are so high and because they operate in stressful environments amid hunger fatigue heat or cold sleep deprivation and the relentless ticking of the clock not for nothing did napoleon call unforgiving time the grand element in warfare which is epic because lately i've been talking about the the the leadership loop and the number one thing i said you have to consider the number one thing that's in the front of my mind all the time in any leadership situation is time what does he call the grand element time is what you have to think about and sometimes the thought is oh we got plenty of time which is cool but you got to think about that people that don't keep time in front of mind they're always behind they're always behind bro we're two paragraphs dude i know and i almost said something go ahead go ahead what do you got i just i always like hearing how these people write and the word like this is a good writer this guy writes well yeah i mean this is just the forward bro but the fact that he went through all those things he was talking about heat cold and i don't even remember all the words uh and when he got to time he added the the additional component of um it can relent yeah or we've got maybe some technology that that we're gonna wear a coat or some cold weather like we can mitigate all these other things but time is unrelenting there is no mitigation and that is that will be forever forever yeah we're not gonna technology our way out of the time issue like oh we'll just slow time down like we can manage the heat and all those other elements i just like the way they he adds that piece to it and what's already like just a good the way he writes is awesome that's why as a leader and as a person it has to be the number one thing you think about it's the only thing that will give you no no slack whatsoever right no zero that's it it that clock is ticking dixon uses several case studies to elucidate military incompetence he begins with the crimean war which britain undertook in an era of rapid industrialization prosperity and commercial dominance wouldn't it what do you think if you've got rapid industrialization prosperity and commercial dominance you just go crush everyone on the battlefield what do you think that victorian britain was the last word in yet its military stumbled from one bloody disaster to the next piling up 21 000 mostly avoidable dead how could this be in view of britain's world leadership much of it dixon finds had to do with the command performance of 66 year old lord raglan an extreme introvert who died of severe depression during the campaign raglan drifted like a rudderless ship the officers under him suffered a familiar dilemma if they took matters into their own hands they could be accused of insubordination if they let the rudderless ship drift further they could be accused of incompetence that's a catch-22 ultimately nothing was done and the british troops and taxpayers bore the brunt of their systemic and command incompetence of which the notorious charge of the light brigade was but the thin end of the wedge since authoritarian organizations again you're going to hear this word and it took me a while to pick up on it even though it's really obvious to me right now this authoritarian attitude is is like this underlying one of the underlying themes throughout this since authoritarian organizations like the military are masters at shifting blame the time-honored tactic of the cornered child the british army survived the fiasco of the korean crimean war unreformed so they went through all that 21 000 dead who knows what the price tag was no reforms a major theme of this book is in the incurability of military organizations they must be removed from their pedestals cracked open and filled with daylight which is another way of saying subjected to rigorous scrutiny and review unfortunately they rarely are raglan's folly which made the crimean war in dixon's judgment the prototype for protracted military incompetence was followed by the boor war somehow despite the similarities of the two campaigns fought far away for imperial interests britain applied no lessons learned from the crimean campaign london's performance in 1899 was even worse than 1855. it's quote military incompetence straining credibly to the breaking point indeed the british officers took pride in their amateurness their clubby good fellowship and their conviction that any effort at self-improvement were bad form i'm going to say that again imagine you're in a group of people where self-improvement is considered bad form they clung to unhelpful routines like sand crabs clinging to seaweed in storm time they battled gorillas on the south african belt with luxuriant baggage including pianos gramophones chests of drawers polo mallets and mobile kitchens and bathrooms they're fighting against the booers savages you're just getting just horrible yeah general redverse buller commanded the expedition like raglan he was in over his head he lacked command experience imagination and confidence he was passive and defeatist the booers swept over him like a turret he never stopped retreating and the press nicknamed him reverse buller field marshall douglas hague's command in world war one is an obvious place to stop and relish the psychology of military incompetence since dixon's book there has been a vigorous debate about hague for and against but few would dispute that hague's psychology had much to do with his his mediocre to abysmal performance as british expeditionary force commander he was an old cavalryman with an outmoded view of warfare he'd been ruled as a boy by a stern religious mother he was solitary aloof and inspired by an obsessive need for order and this is another one of those things that's sort of the authoritarian mindset you want everything to be organized you want everything to be in order and i'll say and i'm not a i'm not a super psychological nerd or psychology nerd but he definitely dips into like the childhood stuff probably a little bit more than i would and the reason i think i don't dip as much into the childhood stuff is i've known people that had authoritarian parents and didn't end up like this right had whatever religious strict parents and ended up you know in every level every type of different person i've known people that had total hippies for parents and let the kids do whatever they want and i've seen those kids end up in different places on the spectrum so i don't know if i i don't know if i i don't know if i correlate these things as as much or put as much weight on the upbringing as dixon does but that's just me it's interesting to know it could be it's definitely a contributing factor depending on how your personality reacts to it because i mean we you and i have kids dave the kids are different like the kids are different you could put them in a controlled environment with the exact same situation because you know oh the ones the middle child the ones the oldest and so oh so that means you treat them differently well even if you put them in a controlled environment they got personalities and that personality is going to come out yeah um so obsessive need forward it took him too long to grasp just how radically technology like machine guns and heavy artillery had changed warfare and rendered most of what he'd learned at staff college in the 1890s obsolete incredibly hague insisted to the end of the war that the battles he was engaged in were not quote normal warfare which is just a bizarre mindset like this this isn't normal we'll get back to normal this is just happening right now this is normal that that's again that reality versus mindset or perception like this is reality this is this is your normal yeah you know yeah then he hasn't figured that out negative he's insane insane worse he gave his subordinates the singular gift of the authoritarian defined by dixon as a terrible crippling obedience officers had to implement haig's vague instructions he left much in doubt because he was so unsure of himself or be replaced and disgraced haig's influence was awful british officers under him were expected to attack and show quote offensive spirit even against the most invincible defensive fire this was to demonstrate quote pluck and quote dash and quote optimism can you even fathom that you're in world war one and my address to you dave is like hey dave all right listen mate what i want you to do is just i want you to charge with all your heart and show that to show the enemy that you've got some puck and some dash by the way yesterday you watch your entire battalion get mowed down or your friend's battalion get mowed down to shelter in the trenches was to exhibit the disqualifying sin of pessimism dave what's wrong mate what you doing down there in the trench why don't you get up there go on go on son it's it's the disqualifying like it isn't like hey hey let's let's pull dave out of his funk here he's like oh he's he he's incapable of doing this because he's his behavior it reveals that he's pessimistic pessimistic about living and this is a guy who you said i think the quote was took too long to recognize the impact of the machine gun how many engagements with a machine gun do you need before you go oh yeah things are different now you don't even need one complete engagement by the way yeah you get you get one volley of fire and you go oh just changed everybody get back in the briefing room we need a new plan [Music] all armies began the great war like this but only hague kept it up until 1917 coldly firing officers who wouldn't follow his ghastly directives prudently dispatched from a chateau dozens of miles behind the lines dixon's brilliant description of the military authoritarian fits hague like a savile row suit superficial toughness and ordering leanness are quote a brittle crust of defense against feelings of weakness and inadequacy the authoritarian keeps up his spirits by whistling in the dark he is the frightened child who wears the armor of a giant his mind is a door locked and bolted shut against that which he fears most himself the imagery is outstanding here this guy's yeah he's hit middlemen all readers will appreciate the drift of dixon's book which might be summarized in george bernard shaw's wartime quip that quote the british soldier can stand up to anything except the british war office micromanaging and stifling of initiative are byproducts of the hierarchical military system a yearning for old certainties like the horse and the battleship even when tanks and aircraft carriers made them obsolete is understandable only when psychology is deployed there is unquestionably in any military in any epoch a prevailing culture of obedience and group loyalty a deliberate process of military socialization as two esteemed psychologists wrote in their 1989 work on the social psychology of authority once the military culture of obedience is established by training and service men are quote governed not so much by motivational processes what they want as by perceptual ones what they see required of them dixon sees fear as the common denominator in the general psychopathology of military organizations and this is interesting fear of the bad performance review not fair getting shot not fair of a machine gun but fear of a bad performance review not surprisingly then fear of failure overshadows hope of success leading to complacency group think and bad decisions so if if i'm afraid of a bad performance review i'm i probably don't want to do anything right i'm probably my go-to is like i'm just going to sit here and we're not going to do anything at best i'm saying well if that's what dave's doing i guess we'll all get in trouble dave will get in trouble first so i'll do what he's doing status quo yeah status quo all day attacking the flaws in a military plan was as dangerous to an officer's career in 2003 as in 1901 officers around secretary of defense donald rumsfeld and u.s central command centcom leader general tommy franks had to bite their tongues when even the most preposterous plans were floated the same went for officers in vietnam pushing for a low-intensity counter-insurgency war as opposed to a high-tempo conventional one was not the way to get ahead in an army that had made firepower and mobility its mantra military organizations dixon tells us can create incompetence uniformity and a greying hierarchy the system all too often creates mediocrity as bright officers adapt to the plan and institutional priorities which are frequently at odds with reality and best practices a recent example of this would be the us army's decision not to deploy large numbers of ground troops to capture or kill osama bin laden in 2001. he was trapped in eastern afghanistan near the khyber pass the army had only to cordon off his cave complex and escape routes with troops but so insistent was secretary rumsfeld on keeping this force small in order to demonstrate the stripped-down power of the army and its expeditionary potential and to leave troops off-ramp for an invasion of iraq that centcom commander tommy franks didn't insist on reinforcements nor would he have anywhere nor would he have anyway for ta frank for frank's took pride in never contradicting the famously cantankerous rumsfeld in the clinch franks lacked moral courage and common failing among ingratiating authoritarians bin laden escaped and would remain at large for 10 more years cognitive dissonance is another danger of the military organization memoirs from centcom and washington remind us that most clear thinking officers recognize the failures of rumsfeld and franks even in real time but felt compelled to keep silent the one who didn't army chief of staff general eric shinseki who insisted that massive numbers of u.s troops would be needed to stabilize a defeated iraq was ridiculed and driven into retirement for the crime of speaking truth to power this reinforces dixon's point that it is not stupidity that leads to incompetence but rather the dead hand of the authoritarian personality which is an interesting take so he has to say that throughout the book because it's really easy just to say hey these guys were stupid but they're not stupid in many cases they're really freaking smart military organizations all too often force their members to act incompetently when asked by president george w bush to distinguish his views on the 9 11 wars from runsfelds general tommy franks weirdly replied sir i think exactly what my secretary thinks what he's ever thought what he will think or whatever he thought he might think given the dreadful stakes in the wars this was incompetence on stilts franks like general william westmoreland is a fine example of the peter principle also referenced by dixon by which leaders are promoted beyond their capabilities to an unimagined level of incompetence and efficiency so the peter principal says that oh dave oh dave did a good job as a squad leader let's make him a platoon leader okay did a good job as a platoon leader let's make him a company commander oh he did a good job as a company commander let's make him a battalion commander but he's not capable so he's not capable but that's his position he's not competent in that position but that's his position and what you end up with is everybody promotes to now you don't get promoted to brigade commander but it doesn't matter you're a battalion commander yeah so now we have a bunch guess what all the other battalion commanders or most of them all the same thing they're all promoted to their level of incompetence right of course general franks thought that he was being submissive and funny he was speaking what dixon calls throughout the book keeping up appearances in this way is the essence of authoritarian structures proving one's reliability even a bad even in a bad cause the internal politics of in war or peace inexorably become a substitute for incisive thinking this decreases initiative and increases dependency there is a huge irony for the pattern of modern warfare from dixon's period to our own has been to require more and more independence and initiative as information and intelligence pass more quickly and in greater volume down the chain of command so even though we've gotten worse and we become more authoritarian the f the flow of information and the ability to maneuver and think for yourself has increased so we're going in the wrong direction dixon forces us to reconsider the assumption that military organizations operate as effective teams in fact they are often anything but effective the difficulties britain's interwar reformers jfc fuller and basil ladell hart had in inducing the british army establishment to quote thresh the grist from the traff chaff in conventional theories of war as full reported are legendary fuller in the 1920s saw new technologies like the tank and the airplane as able to leap from the muscular warfare of the great war to a faster quicker deadlier less destructive mechanized warfare that would administer quick relative bloodless shot through the brain not the interminable pounding with flesh and guns that had characterized world war one so you had people after world war one that and we've covered in great detail bh little delhard in this podcast hey we don't need to do it that way that way it didn't make much sense liddell hart in 1926 considered the british army's problems of institutional rigidity and stuffiness so great that he equated it with illness arguing for the army's quote inoculation with the serum of mobility the army was unmoved forcing gadflies like liddell hart into early retirement god you know what we don't really like what you're saying why don't you retire dixon's account of liddell heart lacks the more recent scholarship on the rather slippery british theorist but he rightly cites that the captain as just the sort of man a military organization finds intolerable brash bright insightful eloquent and opinionated that's who we don't like that's who we don't want we don't want someone that's bright that's brash that's insightful that's eloquent and opinionated we don't want that person it's a potent human being right it's a potent human being it's it's got to watch out for them and it's interesting because you know maybe if liddell hart had read his own book and maybe taken a little bit more of an indirect approach on some of these things he might have done a little bit better convincing the chain of command right 100 he didn't get to read his own book he didn't have that luxury unfortunately for him because he went hard and told them they needed the to be inoculated with the serum of mobility that's a rough thing to say up the chain of command you're telling your your leadership they need to get inoculate there you need you need to completely change what you're doing you need an inoculation that's a that's that's a bold attack that's a frontal attack that's a direct attack nothing indirect about that he became what he became a prophet he was a prophet and what happens a prophet he told us what happens to prophet they get fired they get stoned they get stoned they get crucified that's what happens to prophets and he was a prophet and what happened to him got drummed down to the army there seems to be a place where there's a transformation that happens where these um i don't i don't want to call them students but these kind of rebels become the prophet though right like where there it goes from a kind of a detached perspective to a no this is what needs to happen why won't you listen you know putting that kind of thought forward i feel like they become you know if you start to get emotional which which can happen especially when you've got lives at stake or you're what you know you just pointed to hackworth's book hackwork reached a point where he look he was trying to persuade people and talking about how we should do it and did it with his own battalion and showed what the results were you know we need to do a counter insurgency we need we need to be not going head-to-head we need to act like gorillas right we need to fight like gorillas he was doing that he was showing the results but at a certain point like you just said you are correct a certain point they say you know what we got to stop doing this and they become a prophet and they become martyr and liddell hart became a martyr and got drummed out of the army david hackworth became a martyr got drummed out of the army whether that helped or not didn't help immediately um liddell hart's last act in uniform was to submit an essay on the mechanization of the army for a military competition liddell hart lost to an essay titled limitations of the tank that's crazy right you can't make that up you can't make that up little bit of irony there and they about to get blitzcragged like you read about you know what i'm saying they got blitzcrate straight up that's what went down on britain's failure to embrace armored warfare in time to affect the fighting of 1940 liddell hart recalled if a soldier advocates any new idea of real importance he builds up such a wall of obstruction compounded of resentment suspicion and inertia that the idea only succeeds at the sacrifice of himself as the wall finally yields to the pressure of the new idea it falls and crushes him so he that's him saying he did become the martyr right this is the process of military incompetence vested interests bureaucratic turfs defensive services and uncertain leaders all contribute to a stifling of innovation and all too often a scapegoating of innovators inevitably dixon cites the great french statement george clemenceau in this context quote war is too serious a business to be left to the generals that's no joke fuller who had commanded britain's tank corps in world war one later said fighting the germans is a joke compared with fighting the british the blimpish generals conservatives of a dead military epoch simply would not be budged to be fair there was no easy solution britain had to prepare for war simultaneously in europe against the germans and all across its empire against a range of potential enemies like italy japan and indian or palestinian nationalists tanks might work against the germans but they'd be acquired at the expense of the tools needed to fight the small wars around the fringes of the empire that was no excuse for lethargy yet lethargy is precisely what flourishes in the world of the author authoritarian where vigorous debate and reform are interpreted as a frontry can't even debate can't even debate we're not even having debates around here and you can picture that authoritarian platoon commander he doesn't want to hear a debate about the way we should do this mission doesn't want to debate about that the authoritarian ceo of the company doesn't want to debate about how we're going to move into this new market area he wants people to shut up and do what i told you to do in france charles de gaulle battled the same sort of establishment he wanted a small professional army highly mobile and leveraged with air power his ideas broke against the power of the old sweats like generals maurice gaimlin and philippe pettane who looked back serenely on the victory of 1918 and saw the future as just an elaboration of that not something new tanks betaine characteristically snorted are the sancho ponzas two weighted down to fight sancho ponz is a character in uh don quixote he's like a comic relief fat guy that can't really fight that criticism recalled don quixote himself who told sancho one fine day too much sanity may be madness and maddest of all to see life as it is and not as it should be and of course there was no more twisted authoritarian than joseph stalin who literally destroyed the reforms of martial mikhail turkichevsky turkaczewski's deep battle idea might have made the red army as formidable as the germans in time for world war ii it called for quote linked and simultaneous destructive operations and quote mechanized operational warfare carried on the backs of tanks stalin killed turkicevsky and all of his acolytes in the purge of 1937. he's got some good ideas whatever the general had studied the germans too closely he appeared threatening and suspicious to stalin to stalin precisely because of his restless mind and broad professional circle the two things that should have made him a fine model officer not a criminal the army that survived the purges was a scarcely improved version of the clumsy peasant force of world war one it would perform about as well in its early campaigns imagine you you're france and you get done with world war one and you're like what do we need to change we won and you know the germans were like we lost what can we change maybe if they would have won they wouldn't wouldn't have changed what they did would have come up with the blitz craig speaking of which for the victors of world war 1 the victory proved intellectually crippling old weapons mean old tactics and whereas the germans were plucked clean of weapons in 1919 and forced to begin anew with tanks and aircraft the victorious allies clung to what had worked infantry artillery and field fortifications which reached their apogee with the maginot line all of this reinforced a military tendency to do nothing nothing was safer in the crabbed minds of these men than the risk of failed ventures the dixon's mind is the military authoritarian's lack of emotional maturity that makes him or her so dangerous to the organization even one seated liberally with other authoritarians passive dependent insecure they are in dixon's word frightened children in the army in the armor of men the worst mischief happens when they are promoted to supreme command not because they overreach but because they have risen to that rank by obeying orders suddenly with no one above them be they become unmoored which is a scary thing right who gets promoted i'm promoting the person that obeyed me if i'm an authoritarian who's getting promoted that's the way i should have framed that question i'm promoting the person that obeyed me i'm definitely not promoting dave burke that asked me a bunch of questions every time i put out some word i'm definitely not promoting carrie who's you know got some comment at the end of my briefing that seems a little bit undermining you're not getting promoted neither you i got a yes man over here getting promoted they compensate for their for this weightlessness with procrastination with more or busy work and a retreat into familiar routines and habits in battle they might waste their men or suffer a paralyzing compassion for them and you're the like uh i don't know in the navy or maybe i'm getting this from hollywood i don't know no i think it's from the navy we called um you know polishing your boots chicken chicken stuff right do you guys have anything like that in the marine corps definitely have that term okay would you would you apply the term chicken to polishing boots to pressing your uniform to starching your eight-sided cover doing things that you know mean nothing okay yeah chicken just marine corps carry confirm so um disc confirmed negative i i we didn't use chicken uh and and generation yeah yeah new core yeah yeah you guys called it chicken poo chicken poultry but that's a real thing so what's interesting is he goes into this and says you know if i don't know what to do with dave like i'm not sure what the guess what i do you know polish your boots yeah that's the distinction because as i'm saying that i was like hey the message isn't like you don't need to shine your boots or have a good looking uniform because that stuff doesn't actually that stuff does matter but that stuff matters in a different much like when we hear what hacker's rules were hey here's what i do here's why we're going to do it here's the reason why those things are important as opposed to if i got a doll out of punishment and i got to make you do stuff with your time that is a complete and total waste of time that's what the term my recollection of maybe a generational thing is like what are we doing we're sitting around um we're gonna uh uh um what do we do the strip watch the floor yeah we're gonna strip around the floors again why you can tell i wasn't enlisted there you go yeah yeah so back stripped and whack some floors yeah that's the distinction right there you know and there's this fam there's a meme out there now it's this famous picture it's a picture of a marine um with like a squeegee like squeegeeing the you know the the parade deck in a rainstorm yeah i got it just get back yes we did have a green weenie was the go-to you're getting the green weenie there was what we'd call that yeah yeah right so i mean yeah but another thing he he was talking about kind of the hallmark or the i don't know freaking um sentiment in this authoritarian regime um he said lethargy and paralyzation and there's this type of language that that kind of punishment doling out does to troops that it's just this i don't even care like i just don't i don't care you know and that's kind of that chicken or green weeny vibe that you get when that's the kind of kind of leadership history is littered with such examples general george mcclellan was paralyzed by his vast responsibilities as lincoln lincoln's general in chief general ludwig benedek had excellent chance to destroy the prussian army in 1866 but he didn't dare general general bazine stood with a concentrated french army between widely separated german armies in 1870 but failed the strike in any direction effectively permitting the prussians to unite their armies and win the franco-prussian war one historian accurately described hague's command in world war one as a quote floating helpless whale so slow was haig's so slow was hague to issue detailed direct instructions to his subordinate commanders and solve the problem of the german defensive fire officers with general maurice gamlin who commanded the french army in may 1940 when german panzers knifed across the muse described gamelan as quote stricken by a dull and pervasive fear end quote instead of leading a counter-attack against the nazi invasion invaders the french general sat passively in army headquarters at vincennes a colleague there described him thus quote he was like a submarine without a periscope end quote u.s general john lucas landed on undefended beaches at anzio 1944 yet fearfully dug in instead of thrusting to rome giving the far away germans time to react and circle him and lengthen the war man that that that that fear of making a call that's every one of those examples is just i'm afraid to make a call the best generals dixon concludes have been the mavericks leaders like irwin rommel horatio nelson and napoleon bonaparte men who had the intelligence confidence to resist and roll back the negative psychology of the military organization unfortunately the average general is not this sort of man dixon notes that military leaders are often chosen for their affability or appearance like general buller big bone square jawed or general neil ritchie tobruck a great air of decisiveness but the bluff appearance too often masks doubt and pessimism as t e lawrence would say in the same context too much body and too little head you know what's interesting about this is i was talking to somebody um at an event i was just at and there's a certain military like a military bearing right we use that term military bearing people can utilize military bearing and you see leaders do this in the military all the time they utilize military bearing as a it's like a defensive mechanism you know you talk like this you put the word out you you you fur your brow a little bit and you say no this is what we need to get done right now and and they get good at it they become brow beaters but they're so good at it that people are like well i mean okay i mean that's yeah they kind of back off and and becomes a technique so it's beyond just the way that they look but they start to learn how to act that's gonna just kind of allow them to sort of get away with either not doing something or doing something that doesn't make sense they just kind of you know drop their voice a little bit and and sort of you know stand up straight get that posture going and look someone in the eyes and say you you need to stand down so dave burke raises and says hey boss i'm wondering if we should worry about that high ground hey burke you need to worry about what you need to worry about and people get good enough at that little act that burke submits right because you're asking an honest question but you're not quite it's an earnest question you're not even you're asking a real question and i come at you with that hey burke you didn't don't need to worry about that you need to stay in your lane i got this covered and your response is like oh okay you know roger that that plus seniority oh yeah plus a little bit of rank or whatever on the caller there i mean that's that'll shut down all kinds of pushback shut down all kinds of pushback is that how you operated dave dude you see that i i call that brow beating do you guys ever heard that term before brow beating yeah i call that browbeaters and there's plenty of leaders that that that's their leadership style that they you know they could write a book if they were to try and write leadership strategy and tactics it would just be called like leadership through browbeating and they could go through listen when someone starts asking a question first of all you need to elevate your voice a little bit you need to elevate your voice just a little bit so they know you need to furl your brow which i'm a pro at right i got a i was born with a furrow brow you could prefer your brow elevate you know get your posture a little bit more rigid so they can see that you're not backing down raise your voice and speak in very direct tones burke look you need to worry about your part of the mission and that like you said that shuts stuff down that's the frequency right there yeah just right in there right in there right in there it's interesting just pid'd i just pid a thing right i've been seeing that quite a bit lately too without a sharp and adaptable mind the incompetent general succumbs to cognitive dissonance rejecting or ignoring unpalatable news or intelligence general arthur percival at singapore was this type simply refusing to credit that the japanese attack his fortified island base we ran through that on this podcast that guy's getting reports hey the japanese are literally surrounding us he's like they're not going to attack to explain the average general dixon has to resort to ego psychology the average general like so many average men and women is trapped in the neurotic paradox and here's the neurotic paradox the need to be loved leads to twin quests for admiration on the one hand and power and fame on the other so you want to be liked but you want to be powerful since you got this thing going on all the time naturally the two quests collide violently more power means that more people dislike or envy you the great leaders rise above the paradox by performing competently and taking praise promotion and criticism in mature measured stride like like kipling's ideal man they quote meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same but most of dixon's subjects and the reason look dixon concentrates on the bad so that's when he says most of dixon subs he concentrates on the bad he doesn't concentrate on the good leaders there's plenty of books about good leaders out there most of dixon subjects like most of our own are not great but merely ordinary weak and often petty hence the need to understand and apply the psychological component of history dixon's book is in two parts the first presents the case studies the second the psychological behaviors such as snobbery and anti-effeminacy which contribute to institutional langur in every man and earthy hungry id battles with an intelligent tactful ego overseen by a watchful superego this is good man dixon writes is basically a battlefield a dark cellar in which a well-bred spinster lady and a sex-crazed monkey are forever engaged in mortal combat the struggle being refereed by a rather nervous bank clerk that's what's going on in your head this is the fate of every human excellence mediocrity or incompetence hinge on how smoothly the monkey the spinster and the bait clerk settled their differences reading about older wars one might suppose that modern times deliver more modern officers that the victorian parenting and grimm public schools that form dixon's case studies are relics of an irrelevant past not true american parenting and high schools have apparently contributed no less to military incompetence consider the record in world war one general john blackjack pershing had to fire two american corps commanders six division commanders and 1400 brigadiers colonels and other officers for incompetence this was remarkable carnage considering that america fought for just six months in that war damn george c marshall who served as a colonel on pershing staff in world war one and then presided over the us army in world war ii as chief of staff was anything but incompetent marshall was in many ways the modern the model general sound and mind and body he wrote in 1920 that an ideal officer was of quote the optimistic and resourceful type quick to estimate with relentless determination and possessed in addition a fund of sound common sense which opera operated to prevent gross errors due to rapidity of decision and action for hague optimism and that's the world war one general for hague optimism had been an abstract and silly concept the spiritual willingness to always to attack for martial it was a human concept the spiritual inclination to see a glass is half full to find a way around difficulties and win in spite of them that's a big difference hague thinks optimism is you just go marshall optimism is you figure out a way to win it's a big freaking difference you've been warning people for a little while now and i've been stealing this about the idea of lessons learned actually being a problem there's some risk in there as we fight against bias you've talked about bias on underground you talk about bias in a lot of different ways and certainly on the leadership consultancy side when we're talking to people about ways to make sure that you don't run into problems in the future lessons learned can actually contribute to making mistakes in the future because you will pull these lessons thinking somehow that it it sort of predetermines the next outcome if the situation's the same we know what the lessons are we going to apply those lessons we're going to control the outcome and there's a little part of me just really struggling to hear hearing you read this and yes there's some hindsight being applied here but but how do you look at world war one and reflect on that and say we won yeah when you when you like barely didn't lose and you could play semantics all day long yes i know we won compared to the germans who lost but in a sense that this is a this is a validation of the tactics that we input this is a this is it the lesson learned of what we did work because we won and the idea that we can take that and capture this as a as a reinforcement that the things that we did were the right things that's why we were successful and setting in stone again there's a lot of hindsight here i understand that looking forward if nobody knew in 1919 what was going to happen in 19 you know the 1940s there was we have that understanding now but even in that time how do you look at that war and reinforce that what we did was the right thing when you're on the quote winning side it's insane it's insane we won yeah we won wrong let's do it again yeah that's one of my favorite uh sarcastic favorite jiu jitsu coaching calls is oh carrie that arm locks not working do it harder i've heard it i've heard it marshall also insisted on flexibility of mind to nullify authoritarian tendencies he blocked the rise of time servers and other mediocrities marshall called them calamity howlers for the way they exaggerated difficulties and spun excuses for their failures and noted that such leaders inexorably demoralized their units and infected them with negativity man exaggerating your difficulties of the 42 senior generals who took part in the u.s army's last maneuvers before pearl harbor only 11 would command units in combat in world war ii that's freaking savage that is savage they were firing some people the rest had to be fired or sidetracked as dead wood dozens of american generals would lose their posts in the course of the war to officer an american army that expanded 35-fold in three years marshall put every candidate through his paces shifting them into ever more burdensome and pressure-packed jobs promoting those who excelled those who fail mostly grimly noted are out at the first sign of faltering which is interesting to me i thought i immediately thought to myself oh so that's zero zero defect right so now we're scared but then it doesn't say failing it says faltering it means when the time to step up came you might have made a bad decision okay well you're okay but if you falter you're out later that's a huge difference maybe i'm reading a little bit too much into that but i'll go with it it's a pretty specific word to choose there though yeah walter right now not fail not you know marshall was the exception who proved the rule by 1944 and 1945 the united states enjoyed massive superiority over the germans and men tanks guns and aircraft yet plotted into germany the dynamism of 1941 to 1943 when deutsche eisenhower and marshall had pruned the dead wood and shot younger officers up the ladder was replaced with an emphasis on methodical teamwork that would harness america's material superiority it was like war by general motors with a risk-averse corporate strategy more concerned not to lose than to win swiftly this was precisely the attitude that shaped the post-war u.s army and korea in korea and vietnam officers could no longer be relieved for cause as that would generate embarrassing publicity and congressional inquiries so they were often left in their jobs 70 year old douglas macarthur who commanded the korean war from tokyo possessed every trait of dixon's most encourageable authoritarian and committed every possible error nearly precipitating an american defeat and world war iii in vietnam general william westmoreland's disastrous leadership was initially viewed with great hope westie succeeded a string of incompetents who had misconstrued the war and given the south vietnamese relentlessly bad advice on how to win first samuel hanging sand will hanging sam williams then lieutenant colonel or sorry then lionel split head magar then paul harkins the last derided by defense secretary robert mcnamara as quote not worth a damn westmoreland was supposed to be different but he proved the perfect military incompetent dim blinkered unsure of himself lost and unmoored as a commander he had actually refused to hire vince lombardi as coach of the army football team when he was superintendent of west point in 1960 quote this was not the kind of man i wanted around cadets westy said of lombardi his game plan in vietnam would be no shrewder one might ask how it could be otherwise the vietnam war was directed by a particularly vexing incompetent general maxwell taylor the ultimate pleaser who as presidential military adviser chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and then ambassador of south vietnam flattered first john f kennedy and then linden john lennon b johnson into believing that they could eat their cake and have it too that is fight the vietnam war with limited means and public support and still win it and i read that not great limited means and public support he's saying limited means and limited public support and still win it like the military and civilian advisors gathered around george w bush in 2003 taylor was obsessed with white house access and was willing to suppress conflicting opinions to conceal stubborn facts to keep it that way on the ground in saigon westmoreland rather too eagerly brought taylor's fraudulent talking points to life and westy after all was just the sort of average joe who got his ticket punched in the u.s army of the 1960s he'd never been to staff or war college only to a cooks and baker's school and then a 13-week management course at harvard he never read so harvard business school formed him into a mcnamara-like organization man all charts and graphs that powerpoint general avant-la letra i don't know what the letter i mean i had to look that up means he was a powerpoint general before there was such a thing as a powerpoint general literally means before the letter his search and destroy strategy was an unmitigated disaster not least because of the destroying went on in the south not in the north of vietnam westy doggedly shelled bombed burned and poisoned hundreds of villages succeeding mainly in increasing the number of insurgents and losing support of the south vietnamese people the united states dropped twice as many bombs on allied south vietnam vietnam as on the enemy north more bombs in fact that have been dropped in all theaters in world war ii westmoreland's mantra was firepower like dixon's incompetence he hid in the only thing that he an artillery man knew a man intending to lose a war could hardly have done it with more efficiency that's a freaking rough assessment the fact that his civilian commanders were no more acute in their judgment in no way excused his incompetent strategy he was relieved in 1968. the iraq war reprised the vietnam incompetence with the incurious unassertive tommy frank succeeded by general ricardo sanchez who one historian labeled the william westmoreland of the iraq war sanchez had leaped from division to army command and was the embodiment of the peter principle as a state department onlooker said of him all trees no forest not a strategic or political thought when general david petraeus took over in 2007 he introduced effective counter insert counter insurgency strategy but too late to prevent the dissolution of iraq into sectarian fragments or to buttress plummeting american support for the war senator chuck hagel asked the marvelously prophetic question about petraeus's troop surge quote what if the what is the point of bringing the violence down with u.s troops if it will merely resume once the u.s troops are withdrawn hegel had served as a grunt in vietnam he knew military folly when he saw it nixon's detailed case study ends in 1944 but he has a go at more recent history in the last chapter surveying the martial lunacy of vietnam and the struggle the staggering irrationality of the bay of pigs invasion clearly implying that there is no end of military incompetence and indeed the military ineptitude displayed in the decades since vietnam most shatteringly in the iraq war shows that military incompetence and its psychological roots cry out for continued study and application this book is a template and deserves its classic reputation on this psychology of military incompetence is also a vital cl corrective to what we are experiencing today the uncritical adoration of veterans troops and their officers by the american public and more ominously by presidential candidates in congress living as we do in an age of nonstop semi-war the need for clear unsentimental thinking is more important than ever it has become routine for candidates running for commander-in-chief to describe their global strategies thus quote i would check with my generals and follow their advice end quote dixon jerks us back to reality with our civic responsibilities what if the general or admiral is an incompetent authoritarian blind to the true situation leading the country into a ditch what if the general is a well-masked authoritarian type who cannot learn from experience who denies rationalizes deflects blame and creates scapegoats the last usually quote the folks in washington indeed what deficient american commander has not made this his swan song quote at least in blank i knew who the enemy was here in washington i don't end quote a failed iraq war commander was the last to try that wheeze an old perennial that bloomed during korea and vietnam too read this book absorb its lessons and you will be on your guard against this infantilization to revere the uniform without first peering inside indeed dixon cites a path-breaking swiss child psychologist in this regard quote the adult who is under the dominion of unilateral respect for the elders and for tradition is really behaving like a child that was just the forward of this book uh that's jeffrey walrow and this he wrote that in 2016 or that's when this edition is i got an older edition too you know i got the old school hardcover one because you know that's how i roll because i know when we when we when this podcast comes out people can go out and buy those those old school ones i've already got mine i tried to get as many off as i could off the market we roll into now into dixon's preface and he starts this off and i probably could have i probably could have and probably should have started off this whole podcast with this note that he makes out of the gate he says this book is not an attack upon the armed forces no upon the nor upon the vast majority of senior military commanders who in time of war succeed in tasks which would make the running of a large commercial enterprise seem like child's play by comparison so i should have started the podcast with that because let's face it they're going to go hard in the paint we're already feeling that and it can be very easy to think that any critique of the leadership of these wars or people in leadership positions specifically it can be very easy to interpret this as shots at those people but really and i think this is what's going to be done in the book too is it's going to be more a breaking down of these um leadership you know failing leadership tactics and and you know leadership roles or you know how these guys are doing it more so than these guys themselves you know what i mean am i clothes there unfortunately not no dixon dixon goes harder than paint he's just straight calling these guys out these guys are gonna get called out okay well based on his note there in the preface it sounded like he was gonna go a little different but he's going hard yeah he goes hard he goes hard there's no punches bro and but he but and he doesn't spend as much time he does he does talk about some of the good military leaders but he spends most of his time talking about the bad military leaders right and how just bad they were and why they were bad and the mistakes that they made and it wasn't like well you know he was really making a good decision based on the information he had it's like no no he wasn't right he was you know we're going to get some stories that make you sick to your stomach some of these stories will make you sick to your stomach and and you know dixon served in world war ii dixon was wounded right this guy knows what's up he's probably had some incompetent leaders so he's going to go hard but and look i served with incredible leaders in the military incredible leaders incredible individual i don't know if there could be better leaders than some of the leaders i served with the military so this book isn't an attack on the armed forces or all leaders neither am i and that's not what we're doing here but there are some bad seeds and we need to learn from that because there's some legit things you can do to take corrective measures and watch out for this especially if just like everything else if you aim this book it yourself if you aim this book yourself and you every time i hear a for every time i say authoritarian theme instead of thinking like about your boss or about some subordinate leader that you have if you instead think oh how am i authoritarian because that doesn't oh i do that oh i lean in that direction if you start thinking like that right now that's that's the benefit that's what you should be trying to do pretty much wiped out half my page of notes here did i just did i just jack your notes no that's legit man i kept i you know like i've said this a thousand times i get the coolest part about being on this podcast is i hear the stuff in person live for the first time did you order this book when i told you you ordered it like a year ago yes we but you've been sending me screenshots of like you've been dabbling with this thing for a while i've known this thing's coming so it's cool but it's still mostly brand new like this is all new and i get to write stuff down and part of it is try to think about how this makes sense in my own head and i wrote down like five minutes ago there's a lot of risk with this book and the risk as i'm listening to you is that it's going to be a validation for the listeners that there's a bunch of other screwed up people out there and they're the problem of the other people the other people yeah and when i wrote down i go you mitigate that risk by this by assuming this guy is talking to you not about other people he's talking about you and the risk that you are a reflection of those behaviors the only thing i wrote down that that i was thinking about in sort of anticipation of this is that it's not just these individuals as flawed as they are and i'm glad that we are i'm glad all of us are taking a minute to go hey listen this is not just us taking shots at all these people in the military to be be critical of them because leading is hard the military is hard and there's a whole bunch of reasons but there are flawed individuals the other piece that compounds that for this which is again something we can all think about is that there is a system that promotes that that validates that that reinforces that it helps create and take the worst of these behaviors and magnify them and does your company does your team does your family does your household does your business do the exact same thing yeah and just to add one more little thing that that you said which is 100 right you're right the military can in many ways take these people with these tendencies and promote them it can do that it also even prior to that attracts these people because you know the authoritarian person likes likes um things to be controlled likes uniformity you know if you're if you're uh in college and you like uniformity and you're looking at your your dorm room going gosh i wish everyone would just be quiet at night you're like oh you don't want to join them i'm going to join the military yeah the idea of rank to that person exciting you mean you mean to tell me yeah i put this on and people will listen people will listen to me they'd have to do what i say i'm in oh the idea of uniformity is not a bad thing it's a it's an attractiveness that we literally wear a uniform that attribute is a positive in so many ways for those of us interested in the military so just to both of what you're saying that idea like oh those things you go man i don't want a bunch of yes men uniform thinking you know uh uh group think actually uniformity is hailed as a positive attribute in many ways across the military so much so like 100 the more you look like the person next to you the better you are yes hey that uniform looks exactly like this regulation you're my guy yeah you think about who's getting attracted to this look do you get guys men and women that are patriotic men and women that want to challenge men and women that want to take care of their people and lead absolutely yeah absolutely you do like you get all kinds of do you get someone that just wants to put that rank on and finally get listened to lieutenant cali right and nom they you know you read the backstory on lieutenant cali from the from the me lie massacre it's like oh he was no one respected him in his life he had to go through ocs a bunch of times he wanted that freaking rank so bad it was probably like the most rewarding thing he ever got was to get that finally get that rank and people just shut up and listen to me so that's what you that's what you're tracking so we are you doing that in your company what kind of people are you tracking into your company scary it is however an attempt to explain how a a minority of individuals come to inflict upon their fellow men depths of misery and pain virtually unknown in other walks of life that's a freaking heavy sentence like that's true like hey if you're in business and you're an authoritarian okay cool you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna drive some people crazy whatever right you're in the military you're causing depths of misery and pain virtually unknown in all other walks of life this book involves the putting together of contributions from a great many people historian sociologists psychologists and of course soldiers and sailors it is hope that none of these will feel misrepresented in the final picture which their contributions make for error is a fact and for the opinions expressed i alone take full responsibility okay he's taking some owner ownership in the writing of this book i also owe a great debt of data to to gratitude to all those who gave generously of their time to reading and discussing earlier drafts their encouragement criticisms and advice have been invaluable and he goes on to thank about a freaking page and a half of people names names names names um and then finally he gets to this port for and and by the way one thing that's interesting that you couldn't have predicted is this guy's really funny he's got that dry british humor humor throughout the entire book and he's awesome so he brings the heat now you know you carry he's like i'm sure he's not you know taking oh he's taking shots not only taking shots but some of them are pretty damn funny yeah so he says this he says finally i owe a debt of gratitude to that handful of people who would probably prefer to remain nameless whose hostility and dismay that anyone should write a book on military incompetence provided considerable if unlooked for confirmation of the relationship between militarism and human psychopathology so like all people like you shouldn't write a book like exactly you're the reason why i love that you are the reason why so that's his opening um now we get into chapter one like i said this is gonna be a slow roll with this book um he starts off with a quote at least it's a really short book yeah klaus what's um we only wish to represent things as they are and to expose the error of believing that a mere bravo without intellect can make himself distinguished in war and bravo can be used as a noun i found out after reading that quote means someone that's like a daring man gary man isn't good enough by now most people have been have become accustomed to one might almost say blase about military incompetence like the common cold flat feet or the british climate is accepted as part of life faintly ludicrous but quite unavoidable surely there can be nothing left to say about the subject he's coming out of the gate look yeah military incompetence whatever it's the way it is it's like flat feet some people got it in fact military incompetence is largely preventable tragically expensive and quite absorbing segment of human behavior it also follows certain laws oh that's a bold statement the first intimation of this came to the writer during desultry reading about notorious military disasters these moving often horrific accounts evoked a curious deja vu experience for there was something about these apparently senseless goings-on which sent one's thoughts along new channels making contact with phenomena from quite other hitherto unrelated contexts and then back again to the senseless facts not now quite so senseless until gradually a theme continuous as a hairline crack could be discerned throughout the stirring tales of daring dew that was a big sentence what's he saying in that what he's saying is he started reading about all these military disasters and as he read them he would think about another one and you think about another one and what he started to see was a thread that connected them all together if this pattern was real and it meant what it seemed to mean certain predictions would follow these were tested and found correct yet other pieces began falling into place until gradually the mosaic of elements took on the semblance of a theory this book is about that theory it is concerned with placing aspects of military behavior in the context of general psychological principles this sounds fine a cheerful marriage of history and psychology unfortunately however such a union may not be entirely agreeable to some of potential in-laws judging from the attitude of some historians putting together of psychology and history is to say the least bad form while putting together of psychology and military history is positively indecent there are at least two reasons for this anxiety the first is that since there are few things more annoying than having one's behavior explained there exists a natural distaste for explanations of historical figures with who with whom one perhaps identifies so he's saying look i'm gonna write this book it's about psychology and it's about military history and that's not gonna be popular because a lot of people relate to those military figures those historical military figures and when you start talking about why they made those decisions some people are going to get offended by that so that's the first reason why this is a risky book the second reason is a distrust of reductionism of the idea that anything so complex as a military disaster could possibly be reduced to explanations in terms of the workings of the human mind and this by a psychologist of all people so are you going to tell me all this stuff took place and it was because of this dude you know had a weird psychology about something that's what we're gonna say in answer one can only say that has of course historians know more about history than do psychologists of course historical events are determined by a complex set of variables political economic geographical climactic sociological but ultimately history is made by human beings and whatever other factors may have contributed to a military disaster one of these was the minds of those who were there and another the behavior to which these minds gave rise so there's all kinds of things that are playing into these disasters and yes uh uh the the climate and the g the geography and the economics all those things are playing into it but you also had these human beings minds and how did their minds end up that way now these are complex variables hence it has been necessary to play down the other factors in order to focus more clearly upon the psychological determinants consider the analyst case of aircraft accidents dave burke glad you're here nobody would deny that aeroplanes crash for a number of different reasons sometimes working independently sometimes in unison but this does not mean that the selecting out for particular study of a single factor such as metal fatigue necessitates dwelling on other such variables as bad weather in different navigation or too much alcohol in the bloodstream of the pilot so just because the the pilot was drunk doesn't mean you can't look at the metal fatigue that it put on the wings the case for a reductionist approach however also rests upon other considerations namely that the nature of military incompetence and those characteristics which distinguish competent from incompetent senior commanders have shown a significant lack of variation over the years despite changes in other factors which shaped the course of history so you see failure failure failure failure all these different failures and there's been a lack of variation of what caused the failures from a psychological perspective even though the factors uh the the environment has totally changed so it's not like well you know you had horses and so but you failed and you had tanks and you failed wait a second what's the common thread oh the mind whether they are well equipped or ill-equipped whether they are in control of men who are armed with spears or tanks or rockets whether they are english russian german zulu american or french good commanders pretty much remain the same likewise bad commanders have much in common with the other which is what we say all the time sometimes we'll get asked a question well you know uh what makes what makes this type of person a good leader it's like it doesn't matter what it doesn't matter if they're a frontline infantry leader or a financial consultant company or a construction company the leadership characteristics that make the good leaders are all the same yeah humble leaders usually do better no matter the situation it's ridiculous one reward rewarding byproduct of writing this book has been the many enjoyable conversations i've had with people are in the armed services here again however a small minority viewed the enterprise with dismay as something lacking in taste if not actually boarding on sac religious so he's having conversations with people telling he's going to write this book and they're like oh why are you going to do that he got a little footnote here it says it is fair to add that certain common characteristics of those civilians and servicemen who took extreme view provided a very useful clue as to the possible origins of military incompetence yes sacrilege you should not write a book like that okay to this understandable sensitivity i can only say that no insult is intended and point of fact for the devotees of the military to take exception to a study of military incompetence is as unjustified as it would be for admirers of teeth to complain about a book on dental caries which means decay in an imperfect world the activities of professional fighters are presumably as necessary to society as those of police prostitutes sewage disposers and psychologists it is just because we cannot do without these callings except possibly the last that any serious attempt to understand the peculiarities should be welcomed and indeed taken as a compliment for the token of their importance that we should merit such attention so we're freaking it you've got to be kidding me why wasn't this book why isn't there just like decades of these books being written for every situation every war that's taken place moreover is only by contemplation of the incompetent that we can appreciate the difficulties and accomplishment of the competent if there were no incompetent generals it might appear that the direction of armies and the waging of war were easy tasks well within the compass of all who had the good fortune to reach the highest levels of military organizations however it is not only when contrasted with the inept that great commanders look their best but also when seen in context of the organizations to which they belong the thesis will be developed that the possibility of incompetence springs in large measure from the unfortunate if unavoidable side effects of creating armies and navies this is to your point earlier dave we create these things and they kind of produce or at least have a tendency to produce incompetence and therefore when you're a good leader inside of a organization that produces incompetence you're actually doing double good you get two gold stars for the most part these tend to produce a leveling down of human capability at once encouraging to the mediocre but cramping to the gift but cramping to the gifted viewed in this light those who had performed brilliantly in the carrying of arms may be considered twice blessed i guess i just stole that from him for they achieved success despite bad features of the organization to which they happen to belong this alone would seem to justify an unabashed excursion to the realms of military incompetence but there are additional grounds if anything more pressing they they concern the related issues of cost and probability while few would dispute that the cost grows exponentially with the growth of technology so that the price of wrong decisions must now be reckoned in mega deaths the chance of military incompetence remains a matter for debate we might hope that this would be a declining function for better education more realistic values greater fear of immeasurably worse consequences and an increa decrease in jingoism but there are strong grounds for taking the pessimistic view that the chance like the cost continues to increase with positive acceleration this is getting worse is what he's saying hey don't you think hey look if you're going to go out and you're going to fight with swords and you're a bad leader you're probably going to get 50 guys killed now you're going to go out and fight with artillery and machine guns now you're gonna get a thousand people killed we must be making improvement we're not in fact it's getting worse several reasons may be advanced for this depressing hypothesis firstly the gap between the capabilities of the human mind and the intellectual demands of modern warfare continues that expansion which started in the 18th century it is probably opening from both sides while modern war becomes increasingly swift and deadly and the means by which it is waged increasingly complex the intellectual level of those entering the armed services as officers could well be on the wane ouch he wrote this in 1976 just saying he's like hey if you're going to the military right now you know this tentative supposition is based on the fact that fewer and fewer of the young consider the military to be a worthwhile career again this is post nom he's writing this one has only to look at the contemporary recruiting advertisements to realize the evident difficulties of finding officer material they spare nothing in their efforts to convince an unresponsive youth the services are depicted as glittering toy shops where handsome young men enjoy themselves with tanks and missiles while basking in the respective lower ranks hardly less godlike than themselves in their eagerness to drum up applicants these calls to arms attempt the mental contortion of presenting the services of a classless society in which officers nevertheless remain gentlemen the clear clear implica implication of such expensive pleading can surely be that the market for a military career is shrinking to say the least to meet this fall off in officer recruitment if insufficient has been done in the writer's opinion to improve the real as opposed to the advertised incentive value of military care again this is written in the 70s so you didn't have long lines at the recruiting offices in 1973 when he was writing this you can see how one might have this outlook on the military during that time for sure yeah um skip a little bit here in short possibly less able people are being called upon to carry out a more difficult cost task with a heavier price tag and the highest levels of responsibility which are staggering in the vietnam war alone the military commanders were responsible for executing policies which cost the united states 300 billion dollars seems cheap now coming out of afghanistan a two trillion dollar price tag they were responsible for releasing 13 million tons of high explosives more than six times the weight of bombs dropped by the united states in all theaters during the whole of the second world war they were responsible for the delivery of 90 000 tons of gas and herbicides and they were responsible for the deaths of between 1 and 2 million people these are great responsibilities errors of generalship on this scale would be very costly of course many of the arguments put forward in this book are equally applicable to other human enterprises that's why we're freaking interested in this stuff indeed there is no reason to suppose that incompetence occurs more frequently in military subcultures than it does in politics commerce or the universities there are however apart from the heavy cost of military disasters special reasons for studying cases of military ineptitude so this applies to everywhere that's why i mean this is what we do for a living in echelon from this is what we do for a living but he's going to call out the reasons why he's going to focus on the military the first is that military organizations have a particularly propensity for attracting a minority of individuals who might prove a menace at high levels of command and the second is that the nature of militarism serves to accentuate those very traits which might ultimately prove disastrous which is what we just talked about dave burke likes people to listen to him and he realizes there's a place he can go he can put a freaking gold bar on his collar and he becomes the man in theory then errors of generalship could be prevented by attention to these causes you would think thirdly the public has at least in the democracies some real say as to who should make its political decisions this does not apply to generals so look we get to vote you out if you're a president or you're a senator or you're a representative we can vote you out can't vote on a general chairman of a board you know you look at businesses you know anything like that not the case here yeah we can fire you from your position 100 even the worst government and the most inept prime minister could come up for possible dismissal every so often this is not true of armies and navies we have we may have the governments we deserve but sometimes had the military minds which we did not fourthly if one of the main differences between military and political organization organizations is the degree of public control that between the military and commerce lies in decision payoffs and he's got this note here so relatively trivial and unimportant our most academic decisions that it would be arrogant to discuss them in the same breath this guy takes shots at the academia quite a bit for a guy that's a freaking professor or he was a professor a wrong decision by a company chairman or board of directors may cost a great deal of money and depress a sizable population of shareholders but military errors have cost hundreds of thousands of lies lives and untold misery to civilians and soldiers alike but the case for a study of military incompetence rests upon other issues not the least of these is the need to examine a view of military behavior diametrically opposed to though in no way less extreme than that of people who would vehemently defend senior commanders against even the faintest breath of criticism well this is what i was talking about earlier we think oh this guy was in the military so he must be squared away no this other hypocritical stance seems remarkably widespread thus for many people with whom the author discrust discussed a central topic of this book the notion of military incompetence struck as an immediate and responsive cord rejoinders range from you will have no shortage of data to surely that's the whole of military history so when he told people who's gonna write this book they go oh yeah you got plenty of data on incompetence and isn't that just the entire military history but when pressed for details there was a tendency to become vague and retire behind a 1066 and all that attitude to the subject psychological causes were usually reduced to a single factor low intelligence or as one historian put it the bloody fool theory of military history so look you got people that made bad decisions they were stupid doubtless this view has been contributed to by such books on military ineptitude as alan clark's the donkeys an abrasive critique of the generals of the first world war certainly its title taken from the famous conversation between ludenhirff ludendorff and hoffman and such captions as donkey decorates alliance so this book the donkeys this is a quote that you got you guys ever heard the quote lions led by lambs so here's the original quote according to the memoirs of field marshal vaughn falkenheim cited by alan clark field marshall van ludendorf's comment the english soldiers fight like lions was greeted by his friend major general max hoffman with true but don't we know they are lions led by donkeys and they got a picture in this book of you know some general giving a young soldier an award and the caption is donkey decorates lion the contents of this book imply however that while stupidity may have possibly played a part limited intelligence was certainly not the cause of the behavior for which the generals have been criticized judging from the spate of books among which the donkey the donkeys appeared it looked as if the taboo had been lifted on peering into the military woodshed but mixing our rural metaphors the ernst while sacred cows were once more being transmogfied into nothing more than very unsacred asses transmogrified had to look that word up what is that it means magically change that magically changed so transmorgified thus one historian has ascribed a series of military mishaps to bone-headed leadership another spoke of quote the long gallery of military imbecility while a third has said of british soldiers that their fate was decided for them by idiots so that's what they're normally you know this guy was just stupid and as you read this as you read this book you realize these are smart people in many cases and that's such a dismissive take on that you know it's just like oh that guy was dumb you know it yeah yeah that's exactly the point he's making right is oh oh yeah the guy was just stupid you you and and you know what's funny is how often do you how often did you hear throughout your life oh yeah that guy's smart has no common sense right that's like a common thing oh that guy's oh they'll say oh he's really book smart which is a a dig right it doesn't matter how smart you are if you can't make good decisions and these people are actually smart in many cases the view taken here is that besides being unkind these views are probably invalid the hypothesis of intellectual intellectual incapacity leaves two questions quite unanswered how if they are so lacking intelligence do people become senior military commanders which is an accurate statement i mean you can't be a senior military commander if you're stupid maybe maybe occasionally and what is it about military organizations that they should attract promote and ultimately tolerate those whose performance at the highest levels may destroy the organizations that they represent to answer those these questions however it is first necessary to discover what the job of generalship entails and how it could be done so badly or so well this the bare bones of good and bad generalship is examined in the next chapter in terms of information theory okay you know as i was going through this book trying to decide what you know what i'm going to read i just had to go hard in these first couple chapters to lay down um the background the context and so it's almost like all that right there is starting to head towards what we're talking about the main part of this book is divided into two halves the first is concerned with case histories examples of military ineptitude over a period of some hundred years or so much of this material will no doubt be all too familiar to the reader it is included here and the selections made with two main purposes in mind to provide an aid memoria and because it is believed that common denominators of military incompetence emerge most clearly when looked at in a longitudinal study one special virtue of this approach is that the highlights it highlights the influence or more often regret regrettable lack of influence of earlier upon later events so throughout he's covering these histories and as you cover these histories you can see that there's just nothing learned you know it's even i guess maybe worse or at least the same ballpark as you're talking about dave oh they took these lessons learned and they made them rigid and just as bad as that is we just didn't learn anything for the most part cases of incompetence have been taken from british military history far from being unpatriotic this apparently one-sided approach springs from a sentimental regard for the cross forces of the crown whose record of valor and fighting ability is second to none and whose ability to rise above the most intense provocation either from a civilian population as in northern ireland today or from the lapses of their top leadership in days gone by must surely occupy a unique position in the history of warfare so he's like hey i'm going to talk about the brits nothing against the brits in fact the brits have the unbelievable history but that's what we're going to look at the second half of the book is devoted to discussion and explanation it is subdivided into two parts the first concern with the social psychology of military organizations and the second with the psychopathology of individual commanders and what's i'm telling you i was like oh well maybe i'll just do this maybe i'll just do that maybe let's do one part it the context is so strong and he doesn't play around he doesn't he doesn't wait until the end to start explaining things he's doing it throughout the book so and and as you said and as i said you know you got to aim this book yourself man it's uncomfortable sometimes you're reading this thing and you're like oh oh man like oh i did that i did this you know you can feel it the approach here is essentially eclectic drawing upon ethological psychoanalytic and behaviorist theories it attempts to explain military ineptitude in light of five inescapable if unfortunate features of human psychology these are one man shares with lower animals certain powerful instincts and again these are like the root of what he's talking about these five inescapable parts of our brains so we share with lower animals certain powerful instincts two unlike lower animals most men learn to control frustrate direct and sublimate these instinctual energies so right we got control over some of these things at least we're supposed to we can at least frustrate them that's a good word right we can at least frustrate them three while by far the largest part of this learning occurs in early childhood its effects upon adult personality are profound and long-lasting again this is where you know you get into like uh you know freud and how you're raised and all these little things that are in your childhood and i don't know if that's right or wrong i don't know if that's right or wrong because i think i've seen people that have been raised all kinds of different ways and end up all kinds of different ways but i think the end result is you end up with a personality regardless of where it comes from you end up with a certain personality or certain personal personality aspects that we can pid we can identify them four residues of this early learning and in particular unresolved conflicts between infantile desires and the demands of punitive morality may remain wholly unconscious yet provide a canker of inexhaustible anxiety again really tying our behaviors to what how we got treated when we were kids and if you got you know the room had to be clean you had to clean your plate like all those little things and again chiming if you guys think i'm wrong i've known people that were raised in a totally strict environment and they end up on one end of the spectrum and i've known people that raised in a totally strict environment they end up in a totally different person are there some root things that are overlapping sure but i think we have to look and maybe it's just the way psychologically things play out you know but they're there does he say unresolved yes so i think that has i think that word jumps out at me the unresolved part i think i think a lot of times people are able to come to terms with something from their childhood and and then own it right move past it um i think it's the unresolved part that lingers right where there's still there's a bit of broken something there that hasn't been addressed and because of that it continues to plague the individual as they try to move forward so maybe if i know you two and you both were raised you know in this super strict way and yet carrie was like you know what you know my my mom was just a little bit crazy and that's cool and but dave was like they couldn't let it go maybe that's what makes dave you know a little bit a little bit a little bit harder in that respect or maybe you're both raised by you know the hippie parents that didn't care and you know carrie was like yeah i don't need to care about anything it's all good and dave was like you know i don't want to end up like that you end up with a more militaristic mindset or a trauma hippie mom wrecks the van mm-hmm johnny moves on you know yeah dave doesn't dave dave bears the scar right this thing hidden close to home to you man what's going on here in the sky i'm just saying yeah i really do i think he doesn't wreck the van all right uh the last one when this anxiety becomes the driving force in life's endeavors the fragile edifices of reason and competence are placed in jeopardy so that's scary again regard for me regardless of the source of this personality trait that you end up with it if that be it doesn't matter where it came from if you have it and it becomes the driving force in your endeavors that's where we run into a problem and and i don't want to say it doesn't matter where it came from but regardless of what you think of that we know someone that's hyper e their ego is out of control like it doesn't really matter i shouldn't say it doesn't matter where came from but there's nothing we can do about where it came from but if i understand that dave has a massive ego i'm not sitting there going well you know do i need to have him sit down on the couch you know and like let's go go go hypnotism and break down where he got this giant ego from or am i like okay he's got a big giant ego how do i work through this how do i get this you know how do i approach him with ideas so we can we can dwell on that a little bit where these people how these people end up like this and i think that is important to an extent is just if you can understand somebody a little bit better you can maneuver better but regardless they end up you end up with these personalities different personalities oh my i knew a guy um i mean i know you know there was a whole slew because when i got in the navy so it's 1990 this had to be similar for you there's a whole slew of my friends in the seal teams who parents were just straight hippies just freaking hippies like conceived at woodstock and whatever like just straight up hippies and yet they took the most militaristic life that they could being a commando right so how's that work yeah maybe it's a reaction to that you know and vice versa have you ever known someone that had that hardcore strict religious upbringing and how do they end up wild freaking maniac you know i feel like that's the generic go-to right where it's like the rebel you know came from that strict catholic school you know whatever they just go yeah the other way and it's weird because you that's not neither one of these things is like oh you went to a strict catholic school now you're a rebel no there's plenty of people that went to a catholic school and they become strict catholics so that's i think this is why and again i'm not a psychologist and i don't even know enough about psychology but i'm saying regardless of my opinion because that's all it is an opinion the result that you get is oh this person has a very rebellious attitude and he's in my platoon how do i deal with him or this person has a massive ego he's in my platoon how do i deal with them it says here in due course we shall examine the scientific basis for these propositions and their relevance to a theory of military incompetence because this is a book about incompetence rather than competence about disasters rather than successes these chapters may appear to take an unnecessarily jaundiced view of the military profession and to dwell more upon what is bad rather than what is good and man's attempts to professionalize violence but without teasing out and enlarging upon the less pleasant features of a multi-faceted phenomenon there could be no theory to account for those human aberrations which have caused so much unnecessary suffering as war as klauswitz wrote of war this is the way in which the matter must be viewed and it is to no purpose it is even against one's better interest to turn away from the consideration of the real nature of the affair because of the horror of its elements excites repungence so we shouldn't not look at war just because it's freaking savage to the reader who recoils and discussed from these chapters i can only say that the theory they advance is based upon the emergence of a pattern of which each small piece may in itself seem trivial possibly ludicrous even obnoxious but which when put together with other pieces begins to make sense this interdependence between the parts necessitates keeping an open mind and however much one may dislike or disbelieve the existence of individual trees postponing judgment until the wood is seen in its entirety for the reader who is obsessed with trees and thinks that history should be left to historians ideas about soldiering to soldiers and that psychological theorizing should never go below the belt this is the moment to stop reading and save yourself some irritation we're rolling into chapter two which is generalship war is the province of uncertainty three-fourths of those things upon which action and war must be calculated are hidden more or less in the clouds of great uncertainty clausewitz in a situation where the consequences of wrong decisions are so awesome where a single bit of irrationality can set a whole train of traumatic events in motion i do not think that we can be satisfied with the assurance that quote most people behave rationally most of the time end quote this this is a quote that i say to clients all the time hey people are crazy including you you've got to deal with all these crazy people so assuming that people are going to behave rationally is a dumb thing to assume and the additional layer that you already talked about earlier is what's rational to me is not rational to you yeah so even my expectations of what i think you would do as you consider rationing like this is a totally rational thing for me to do and it's exactly opposite of what i would do which is crazy that you and i can have those two opposite views yep but that's the reality uh war is primarily concerned with two sorts of activity the delivering of energy and the communication of information this is a crazy thing to think about the delivering of energy in war each side is kept busy by turning its wealth into energy which is then delivered free gratis and for nothing to the other side such energy may be muscular thermal kinetic or chemical wars are only possible because the recipients of this energy are ill-prepared to receive it and convert it into useful form for their own economy if by means of say impossibly large funnels and gigantic reservoirs they could capture and store the energy flung at them by the other side the recipients of this unsolicited gift would soon be rich so and the other side so poor that further warfare would be unnecessary for them and impossible for their opponent opponents it's a very interesting way to i've never heard it put that way it's the truth right yeah it is creating energy and hacking it at the other side for free for free and only because they can't handle it unfortunately such levels of technology have not been reached in the vietnam war alone the united states delivered to indochina enough energy to displace 3.4 billion cubic yards of earth 10 times the amount dug out for the canals of suez and panama combined and enough raw materials in the shape of fuels metals and other chemicals to keep several major industries supplied for years in fact apart from a little slum clearance this abundance of energy was wasted consumed in the making of 26 million craters and laying waste of 20 000 square kilometers of forest and the destruction of enough crops to feed 2 million people for a year however while the reception of energy is still totally uncontrolled this is certainly not true of its direction and delivery indeed these have become a matter of some sophistication and the prime concern of the military and naval commanders there's the job of deciding how when and where to dispose of the energy which their side makes available they do this by occupying nodal points on a complex communication network in other words the ideal senior commander may be viewed as a device for receiving processing and transmitting information in a way which will yield maximum gain for the minimum costs whatever else he may be he is part of a telephone exchange and part computer these the common denominators of general ship are depicted in figure one and now he's got this figure here and this is uh we're gonna go like a little bit of ooda activity so dave can get all excited he's got this first section which is input this is what this is the input that you're getting you've got the program that you're on the broad strategy the directives from the government the orders from higher military authority etc you've got information about the enemy about your own troops this includes strength disposition morale intentions supplies capabilities you've got miscellaneous information weather forecast time of year moon tides limitations of staff communication map so you got all these things that are you've got your input now the input that you get as a leader gets pre-processed by the staff the what the staff is doing is they're receiving it they're putting it through it through a decision process they're running it through a program of their own previous experience they got their memories how good is their memory and then you get this output which eventually brings you results and by the way that's a loop the whole time so you got that's the decision thing that's happening you got information you're processing it you're bouncing off your experiences you're bouncing it off your your uh staff you run that loop until you figure out what you should do which is pretty straight which is seems complicated and you already tell it'd be hard it's going to be hard to make a really like a solid decision and then you've got this other section here which is called noise and this is what this is what screws you up external enemy action inadequate intelligence sources deluded chief of staff et cetera et cetera internal defective senses or memory so those are like you got all kinds we could list a million things that are external that are distractions and noise internal you've got defective senses emotion rigidity stretch stress dissonance alcoholism neurosis there's all kinds of things freaking you're a disaster you're a disaster is what you are so he says so so i just kind of like described what this diagram looks like for those who don't relish in flow diagrams let it suffice to say that on the basis of a vast conglomerate of facts to do with the enemy his own side geography weather etc coupled with his own long-term store of past experience and specialist knowledge the senior commander makes decisions that ideally accord with the directives with which he has been programmed ideally but these ideals are hard to meet for there are two main reasons the first is the senior commanders often have often to fill a number of incompatible roles according to morris janowitz these include include heroic leader military manager and technocrat so that's what you've got to do if you're a leader in the military heroic leader military manager and technocrat to these we would add politician public relations man and father figure and psychotherapist because that's what you're doing the second reason for a breakdown is what communication engineers call noise in the system noise is what interferes with the smooth flow of information its destructive power hinges on the fact that senior commanders like any other device for processing information are channels of limited capacity if they want to deal with more information they will tend to take longer about it if they don't take longer they will make mistakes here we are using the term information in a special and perhaps its most important sense as the that which indeed reduces uncertainty so that's what information is information is that which which reduces uncertainty let me expand on this a little acquiring knowledge involves the reduction of ignorance through the acquisition of facts but ignorance is rarely absolute and its reduction rarely total doesn't matter you're not going to know everything and you're not going to know nothing hence reducing ignorance can be regarded as reducing uncertainty about a given state of affairs it follows that an unlikely or unexpected fact contains more information i.e reduces more uncertainty than one which is already expected he's going to go into that hard that what i just said it follows that an unlikely or unexpected fact contains more information i.e reduces more uncertainty than one which is already expected we already expected it well it doesn't really help me that much but an unexpected fact is less readily absorbed than one which was expected ooh i wasn't expecting this to happen so i'm going to kind of reject it if this is less than crystal clear consider the following example cast in a suitability suitable military context the message in this case consists of an intelligence report which states quote enemy preparing for counter attack attack end quote it goes on to detail strength disposition date and likely sector for attack now this message factually so simple contains amount of information which differ greatly from commander to commander to general a who anticipated such a counter attack it conveys very little it merely confirms a hypothesis which he already held in fact since he had already made extensive preparation for a counter-attack the intelligence report when it came was largely redundant so that's general a hey i was expecting this cool got it in the case of general b however the same message was quite unexpected so little had he anticipated an enemy counter-attack that the news was charged with information it reduced a great deal of ignorance and uncertainty it gave him plenty to occupy his mind and much to do and i'm going to dive into that part right there because this is really important finally we have general c for whom the message was so totally unexpected that he chose to ignore it with disastrous results it conflicted with his preconceptions it clashed with his wishes it emanated so he thought from an unreliable source since his mind was closed to its reception he found plenty of reasons for refusing to believe it like british generals after the battle of cambray or american generals before the german counter effect offensive in the ardans of 1944 he ignored it at his cost its information content was just too high for his channel of limited capacity and and so those three examples and when i when i first read this i thought general a it doesn't contain much information because he was already expecting it general b got a lot of information from it because he wasn't expecting it and it seems like general b might be in a better situation because he was he got more information but that's not true and it all boils down to this last thing its information content was too high for his limited channel of cap capacity of his limited uh channel limited capacity i think an advantage that i have and that i try and teach other people is to have an open mind and to and to not when new information arises to to absorb it and and accept it and be like okay this is new information i take it with a grain of salt of course but i'm not and and and go even further than that it's not just that my mind is open it's that i'm i'm actually trying to anticipate what's going on i'm actually thinking well what are they probably going to do you know they're probably going to do this and when but i don't dig in on that you know the enemy could probably have attacked from the west but i don't know the enemy's going attack the enemies are going to probably attack from the west but they could also come from the south and you know what they could come from these north doesn't matter i think that when you said the word anticipation was the peace as i'm hearing you talk about it you hear those three generals and you think oh b's the right guy oh you thought that no no no no no no no no no i i i don't i actually i'm i'm trying to explain the logic it seems at face value as it unfolded in my head yeah yeah like oh i could see people going oh b's the best example because he got the most information oh man this changes everything holy cow and clearly sees the worse because he's like i can't accept that in my brain so we're not doing that i don't acknowledge it and to his folly like it's gonna the whole team's gonna get wiped out but when you said anticipation because i think of it as you've as we talk about it as we teach it and as as you've discussed it which is i'm going to do these things i'm going to make these moves i'm going to i'm going to try to create a situation that unfold a certain way but i know i know it doesn't go the way that i expect which means i am anticipating a bunch of other potential options now i don't necessarily know which one it's going to be but when you come back and say it didn't go let me say it differently it went this way and no matter what this way is you go okay i can see that i can see how our moves created this outcome and maybe not even what you want or maybe not even what you expected but the other ones aren't unexpected which makes it so much easier to go okay cool now i've got the information here's the adjustments we're going to make or hey we'll continue down the path if it's the way we wanted but the anticipation that the outcome is not what you want that word that's the piece for me that resonates which is the best situation to be in is oh it was different than i wanted even a little different than i expected and i'm not surprised by that i don't get caught mentally off balance very often because you don't predetermine the outcome because i don't i don't lean too hard now i'm not saying i don't lean but i don't i don't lean so much that when that resistance isn't there i just fall in my face yeah and i i i steal like a comment that you made with from from your second platoon commander over and over again the context he was using it was someone on his on your team doing something wasn't really smart and it's just the simple saying of you gotta expect these things to happen but i overlay that onto everything i can think of which is oh that didn't really go as expected but i'm not that surprised by it like yeah i kind of expect these things to happen and just the idea of saying you gotta expect those things to happen other people thinking holy cow this is a level 10 emergency this is a unsolvable tragedy he's like no i i kind of am used to these type of things going the way that people don't expect and we can actually solve this i can absorb it and make some changes no factor yeah yeah don't over commit to your brain over commit the outcome the the other thing about this example is with this mechanical like dissection he's doing of all this stuff there's he talks a lot about the capacity and with general a you've got very little capacity left over from what you were expecting right so you've got your expectation of what's going to happen and you've got some capacity left over to to dedicate to what's actually happening um guy b or the general b let's say um he it takes him by surprise so now he has to do so much more back end work that general a's already done and he's got all this free capacity that now he can dedicate to what's actually happening and the third guy has got so little you know that he just he's he's he chooses to willfully ignore what's happening rather than take on the challenge of you know yeah if you did one of those uh games where you have to look at something for a short period of time and remem remember as much as you can if i said okay dave i'm gonna show you a car in this next picture it's a ford bronco and i want you to remember as much about it as you could you'd be like okay here's the caller here's the license plate but if i said hey carrie i want you to go and i'm gonna show you a picture tell me as much about it as you can you you'd be like get half a quarter of the information because you just don't have that much your their capacity is already taken it's overflowing right with stuff trying to make sense of the color right like you're trying to figure all this out and you're just overwhelmed so that's what we're trying not to do right and i think also too just from a leadership standpoint when you're thinking about people there aren't three versions of people out there there's seven billion versions of that so this is a is this is a dial across all those spectrums and and certainly you can categorize that and those examples are good examples but even inside there you don't just get three yeah if you got a team of 26 you're not don't bend them into three categories and presume they sit in those bins i bet you that you could probably break it down into weight classes though and not end up with seven billion but end up with like nine classes you know and it's really just there's a spectrum inside there yeah for sure like oh yeah you're between you know 170 pounds and 185 pounds like we know what kind of we know you're like you know you're like leaning really hard we know what you're gonna do yeah um this continues one particularly hazardous aspect of the relationship between information and decision processes concerns the re the revising of decisions it seems that having gradually and perhaps painfully accumulated information in support of a decision people become progressively more loathe to accept contrary evidence so this is everything we're just talking about you make a decision you've got some information and now we're not one to accept anything different as edwards and his colleagues have shown the greater the impact of new information the more strenuously it will be resisted which is actually crazy it's actually crazy dave's like i'm heading north i'm hey i'm heading north we're heading north right now we made the call and i'm like hey actually bro there's like enemy up there and you're like we already made the call like are you sure total resistance there are several reasons for this dangerous conservatism new information has by definition high informational content and therefore firstly it will require greater processing capacity secondly it threatens a return to an earlier state of gnawing uncertainty and thirdly it confronts the decision maker with the nasty thought that he may have been wrong no wonder he tends to turn a blind eye i mean i talk about this in one way or another all the time all the time isn't it scary to think i'd rather just be wrong than go back to just being uncertain look we're going north bro there's there's enemy up there yeah but at least i know where i'm going freakingdisaster.com dude so much for a broad description of this most vital dimension of knowledge its prior improbability let us return now to the other side of the coin the problem of noise noise as we saw is the enemy of information noise takes up channel space and thereby disrupts the flow of information the more limited the channel capacity the greater disrupting effects of noise the more noise the less information can be handled and and um again as i read this i look for some of the things that i do wrong some of the things i do good man i am a noise eliminator i am a freaking noise eliminator there's stuff going on around me that doesn't matter it i like give it no no i don't give it a second of my energy just to be able to recognize what is noise and go hey that's noise we're gonna we're gonna filter that out as opposed to the overreaction that most people have and and i keep in my own head going back to things that i recall as you're as you're reading this i've been thinking a lot about band of brothers and there's a character in there if you haven't heard it it's the book is awesome the the the the tv series is like incredibly good it's very rare that i take a book and see the the tv version i'm going that was really really good the tv version is awesome there's this character captain sobel who's kind of like this tyrant of a leader and there's a scene where he's leading this platoon and he runs into like i think it's like he's maneuvering to get to some objective and and he ends up up against like a barbed wire yeah this fence isn't supposed to be those beers it's not on the map and this guy's like sir we can we can just go we can just cut the fence and he's like yeah but it's not supposed to be and he spends all this time reacting to the idea that this fence was not on the map and the people around like sir it's like a barbed wire fence we could get through this thing in literally five seconds but that noise of the fence that's it's not supposed to be here and he was incapable of responding to what appeared to be this and it's the inability to go oh oh hey this is a distractor hey this is noise we need to filter this out i would say that's actually a better example of this isn't what i expected and therefore i can't accept it well part of that yes it's beyond noise because noise is like well there's other stuff going on but he's seeing something with his own two eyes and he's like hey them this isn't supposed to be the map doesn't have this well it's funny you said that because i've been thinking about him for about 30 minutes and i chose this as the example but where it really indexed for me was when you gave her those three examples yeah and i'm like dude that's captain sobel man this is in the character that they he talks about in this book to reveal what this character was like and it brought me back to authoritarian you know he'd do uniform inspections if you had one thing off you lose your weekend pat he was just such a follow the to the to the detriment of himself and everybody around him but you know what the military loves a uniform platoon they all look the same uh it's just a character but it's it's that idea that the incapacity to to acknowledge those things and be able to deal with them and happen in real time and go hey this is no factor everybody goes oh okay cool it's just a character but it's also a complete and utter caricature of this authoritarian leader we can probably just start referring back to him throughout this the rest of this book it's so pretty strong um a glance back at figure one suggests that not only does a senior military commander receive more than more than his fair share of information but the communication system of which he forms a part is a peculiar peculiarly susceptible to noise this may be external in origin ranging from the static on a radio link to the delusions of a chief of staff or it may be internal ranging from such peripheral sources as poor eyesight a common feature of the generals of the crimean war to such centrally central and usually more disastrous causes as defective memory brain disease neurosis and alcoholism uh noise from all these sources may act upon the flow of information through a general's head and eventuate in decisions varying in gravity from the mildly inept to the utterly catastrophic but decisions hinge upon more than available information they also depend upon quote payoffs the anticipated consequences of choosing one course of action rather than another payoffs may be positive or negative beneficial or costly they are the criteria according to which decisions are made obviously if a commander gets his criteria wrong if the possible loss of self-esteem or social approval or fear of offending a superior authority is given greater waiting then more rational considerations the scene is set for calamity so there you are trying to make a decision and you're weighing if you're gonna lose self-esteem or if you're gonna lose social proof which is crazy but we know that happens the possibility of this happening is increased by the fact that the fog of war unlike uncertainties which attached to most civilian enterprises extends not only to the input but also to the payoffs not only does the general have to make decisions on the basis of a great volume of dubious information and to meet and meet a program of perhaps questionable validity he may also not know the cost and benefits of what he does propose he is like a man who places a bet without knowing the odds or where the bookie might be found once the race is over this is a freaking hard job as well as those problems which are inherent in any communication system the human decision maker is the victim of another hazard namely that attention perception memory and thinking are all liable to distortion or bias by emotion and motivation as needs arise whether they be social or biological neurotic or adaptive so they act upon a way man perceives his external world what he attends to the sort of memories which he conjures up and the decisions which he makes he is like a computer which has not only to receive store process and deliver information but also has to postpone sleep cope with hunger resist fear control anger sublimate sex and keep up with the joneses when it is considered that the capacity for perception and response for memory and thought presumably evolved for the satisfaction of needs it is a remarkable achievement at the best of times to keep these informational processes of mind free from bias by the needs which they were originally designed to serve so you got all this stuff going on in your head you're genetically built this way to have these thoughts and have these pulls and have these biases and it's like it's hard as hell to keep that stuff and make your operating system as clean as possible and then he says in war such an achievement borders on the miraculous and this for very one simple reason the effects or needs the effects of needs upon cognition are maximized when the needs are very strong and external reality is ambiguous or confused it is under such conditions that need and emotion have the greatest freedom of maneuver the greatest capacity for imposing themselves upon the uncertainties of thought these are the conditions which obtain in war and that is freaking important this whole idea that emotion has the greatest freedom of maneuver and the greatest capacity for imposing itself on you during times of uncertainty and this is why this is why people get crazy this is why people get crazy when you go on deployment in a combat zone this is why somebody that's acting normal and seems to be good to go and all of a sudden you get you get on deployment and they get crazy because that emotion starts to come out i remember i wrote a note to my buddy a good friend of mine just just to recount this idea when i was lucky enough that i was one of the first units to deploy after 9 11 to go to afghanistan and start dropping bombs out there which was at the time like the best thing ever it's like what i wanted to be doing oh 9 11 happened and everybody was sort of scrambling to go i came back and then iraq was we we knew that iraq was going to happen relatively shortly after we came back within the year and i remember writing a note to a buddy of mine who was getting ready to go to his first combat deployment and i just said the people around you were are going to do crazy things people that you think you know are going to do things that totally catch you off guard that was like my first lesson from just and that's a very small degree compared to what he experienced in world war ii and the biggest takeaway when he was asking hey hey what can i expect it had nothing to do with the tactics i said the people around you are going to do things that catch you off guard they're going to surprise you because the situation's gonna their circuit breakers are gonna pop and it's gonna blow their minds yep yep and there's that's a warning i've given people as well of you you get right on deployment i remember explaining to someone hey it's going to get wild and meaning people can start acting crazy and and uh you know having people say no they're not i'm like okay you know fast forward two months it's like bro what's happening with this dude i'm like remember when i told you people were gonna get crazy there you go [Applause] contemplation of what is involved in generalship may well may well occasionally surprise that incompetence is not absolutely inevitable that anyone can do the job at all particularly is this so when one considers that military decisions are often made under conditions of enormous stress when actual noise fatigue lack of sleep poor food and grinding responsibility add their quotas to the ever-present threat of total annihilation he's like hey bro it's a miracle anyone can pull this off i love the sentence actual noise actual noise and that's in italics i hope i said it in italics because it's in italics indeed the foregoing analysis of generalship prompts the thought that it might be better to scrap generals and leave decision-making aspects of war to computers a similar argument has been has been advanced in connection with medicine why leave diagnosis and therapeutic decisions to fallible human brains when a computer could make them with far less chance of error the answer of course and this no doubt contributes much to the relief of generals and doctors that computers make poor leaders and indifferent father figures they may be quick and efficient unprejudiced sober and alert but with all remain cold fish they do not inspire affection with its consequent desire to please nor do they exude a bedside manner paradoxically they are also perhaps just a little too infallible they are moreover as we as far as we know devoid of feelings what is worse quite indifferent to outcomes of their decisions but while all this militates against computers as leaders of men so-called leadership qualities in military commanders are just as dependent upon the various factors outlined in our flow chart as are any of the other responses which a general makes prejudice ignorance fear of failure over conformity and sheer stupidity may disrupt leadership decisions as surely as they interfere with planning or technical decisions all are products of the same brain man there's a lot going on one last point a senior military or naval commander does not indeed cannot act in lonely isolation but is fettered by the organization to which he belongs he is like a computer or telephone exchange whose modus operandi is based on rules which may have little relevance to the tasks it is called upon to perform imagine a telephone exchange that for the honor of the post office has to follow the rule that all telephonists should have red hair 38 inch busts and heavily littered eyes and one has some idea of the restricting effects which an organization may have upon its own functioning in these chapters that follow we shall be examining some well-known cases of military incompetence to discover if possible the precise reasons for and the common denominators of these events for the moment however let us consider one brief and less well-known incident which illustrates how the smooth flow of information through the brains of senior commanders may be so distorted that their decisions prove catastrophic the culprits in this instance are naval not military commanders the place is samoa in the date 1889 seven warships three american three german and one british are lying at acre in the harbor of apia they are there as naval and military presence to watch over the interests of their various governments in the political upheavals that are taking place ashore accordingly they anchor in what has been described as one of the most dangerous anchorages in the world for to call apia a harbor at all is at best an unfortunate euphemism largely occupied by coral reefs this saucer-shaped indentation lies wide open to the north whence the great pacific rollers come sweeping in in fair weather apia provides an uneasy resting place for no more than four medium-sized ships for seven large ships and numerous smaller craft under adverse conditions it is a death trap this was the situation in which the seven men of war witnessed the first bleak portense of an approaching typhoon they got seven ships inside this little harbor which this little harbor actually has an open mouth to the sea full of reefs full of regions and it's b it's big enough for four ships there's seven in there even to a landsman a rapidly darkening sky and falling glass squally gusts of wind and then a lull would bode ill for seven naval captains the signs were unmistakable they knew they were in a region of the world particularly subject to typhoons which in a matter of minutes could lash the sea into a furious hell of boiling water they knew that such storms generate winds traveling at upwards of 100 knots gusts that could snap mass like carrots reduce deck fittings to match wood and throw ships on their beam ends they knew that this was the worst month of the year and they also knew that only three years before every ship in apia had been sunk by such a storm in short and in terms and in the terms of our flow chart their stored information coupled with present input pointed to only one decision to get up and get out and as if this was not enough the urgency weighing of weighing anchor and putting to see was respectively suggested by subordinate officers so you got a freaking massive storm approaching by the way what was it a year three years before every ship in the harbor had been sunk we've got subordinate officers that are saying hey captain we should get out of here but the captains of the warship but the captains of the warships were also naval officers and so they denied the undeniable and stayed where they were their behavior has been described as in quote error of judgment that will forever remain a paradox in human psychology end quote when the typhoon struck its effects were tragic and inevitable without sea room their anchors dragging under the pressure of the mountainous seas their holes and rigging crushed by the fury of the wind three of the warships collided be collided before being swept onto the jagged reefs of coral another sank in deep water two more were wrecked upon the beach of all the ships in the harbor the only survivor was a british corvette which thanks to its powerful engines and superb seamanship squeaked through to the open sea why did the naval commanders versed in the ways of the sea and provided with ample warning thus hazard their ships and their lives of their men a superficial answer might be pride or fear of appearing cowardly or fear of criticism from their superiors these matters are to be pursued in later chapters for the moment the apparently encourageable behavior of these men illustrates how decision process can be thrown into disarray by noise of internal origin and how in this instance anyway incompetence cannot be attributed to ignorance or ordinary stupidity the the it's an into the the focus of that is this is an internal noise it's it's internal they they knew what was coming they could see what was coming there's no lack of communication they're watching the storm come they have the history they have they know what's happened in this harbor before there's like everything is clear and yet the decision by seven captains i guess six one of them made it out sounds like he squeaked out though they all make the wrong decision how does that happen no external factors can be blamed in this situation it's internal it's internal noise that comes from our own psychology so well two and a half hours deep um i say we call it for today uh this book is going to be uh there's so much in this book um and and i'll start to speed up a little bit i think as we as we push into the next podcast um hit some of high waves for the section where they cover the historical disasters but like i said it's not like he just talks about the historical disasters and explain what happens he starts to explain why decisions are getting made where the ego comes into play who's who's offending one another what these internal decision disasters are caused by and and i'm telling you it is a great warning for all of us military civilian business family and you can probably already see the the this is what we talk about all the time this book these these topics are what we talk about all the time and the examples bring them to to even clearer light we'll get into it on the next podcast until then uh carrie we are we are trying to prevent our own incompetence as much as possible in every aspect of our lives we are what uh what uh what can you recommend to us to try and mitigate our own incompetence that's not a very high goal is it mitigating our own incompetence what do you got so we want to battle incompetence we want to be more capable not less capable um we want a clean operating system oh i like where you're going with this operate clean right uh-huh so how can we do that we're going to do that with a little bit of jocko fuel a little discipline go a little rtd in a can possibly some afterburner orange or mango mayhem from the big dog echo charles who the big dog echo charles the hawaiian that name rings a bell oh the guy who's job oh yeah i forgot his name the big dog echo oh people are going to freak out oh man k dogs on here they're like wait a second what happened to echo charles cover move yeah okay how about that so he couldn't make it today echo charles was otherwise detained right on so okay dog had k-dog had to step up to the plate how'd it feel in the hot seat over there because you've been behind the scenes i've been behind the scenes a little bit i've been in the i've been in the other side of the camera yeah yeah yeah now you're front and center now we're in here and maybe echo's like he's on the ropes echo is an institution as far as i'm concerned and i i'm that makes one of us i am happy to fill in though man honestly it's uh it's super cool to sit at the table i've said this to you and probably dave two men hollowed ground the people who've sat around this table man it's it's something special so super cool to be able to do it uh today for sure right now so we're getting some jack-o-fuel jack-o-fuel.com chocofuel.com we're getting some discipline go going to wawa and just clearing shelves that's where we're at if you go to wawa and you clear a shelf let me tell you what you're doing you're helping every other trooper in america that's what you're doing because as other convenience chains see what's going on at wawa they're like oh oh okay we got it so roll into wawa and just get some just clear shelves um huawei's got something going on right now right with you discipline yeah if it's october when you're listening to this yeah right now you you buy one and you get another one for a buck maybe missed it which is kind of dope well we didn't miss anything this comes out tonight tomorrow night yeah right k-dog's just gonna roll right in hey hot get it get out the wobble for that bogo action uh oh look at you let's not get one though because it's it's a buck buy one get one for a dollar right yeah uh joint warfare super krill um these these things are all battle against that noise we're talking about body body noise physical noise that elbow noise oh you got some elbow noise bro always well not you know i got some shoulder noise if i'm telling you if i don't if i if i miss out on joint warfare it's a problem that's why i don't miss out on it joint warfare and super krill that's my that's my go-to man get rid of that noise how about that mulk dave you get on that multi are you still on strawberry yeah dude you've been on strawberry for a while i don't know what's gonna ever i mean i i have them all i got a line up in my closet or my my pantry button it's it's like um you know it's like afterburner orange for me that's what i'm going to it's strawberry's the best do you so right now you're drinking what back savage what do you got over there i got a dac right in front so at the at the gym here we were out of afterburner orange which i know is no big surprise to you but do you ever think ah i almost wavered today on jocko palmer i was like you know maybe i'll go tropic thunder cause tropic thunder especially when it's cold it's freaking legit but you're still strawberry yes and milk strawberry that's it dude i'd mix nothing in that it's strawberry and milk and that's it i don't like and hey no criticism that's your game but like in the stuff that people put in there and like i i put in the shaker cup i shake it up when i drink it and there's nothing i want to add echo charles over here he's got to go to the grocery store what do you know what i'm saying the frozen banana game changer all day all day that frozen banana something about that tell us you're putting that word huh oh man she's never how does it when you you got to blend it then too that's a whole issue here's the thing with me i like to eat sure but you know some people they they they have like a whole it's a it's a ritual right and they're gonna get they go to the store and they're like picking stuff up and then they fire up the grill and you know i got a nice grill and everything i i you i'll put in the microwave like i'm not i'm not firing that thing up i'm one of those people we're looking for efficiencies oh i will i will open up a can of chicken from costco and just that's dinner if my wife didn't make good food i would just be eating you know a a can of of of chicken you'd be on that k dog yeah i played the k-dog routine it's the single life homie yeah you're just full-on in it yeah two cups of green beans some hawaiian rolls you're good to go you're ready to rock and roll so but you know what is good that's why i'm not i'm not exploring the freaking half frozen well ripe banana or whatever it is we're doing right i'm over here i'm with dave i'm like milk malk we're good but here's the shake it up for me that milk mulch combo yeah my scale you know what i'm giving it i'd give it a 10. yeah i'm giving it a 10. it's like i'm just suffering through the seven six point negative no it's a 10. that's that's where all this other stuff you're doing you know what's going to get you to a 10 yeah that's where i'm at right now so i don't need it yeah i i'm the same way now i will say um [Music] i'm not solo on one flavor right now i'm i'm bouncing around i bounce around i used to go like one month on a flavor and then i go in three weeks on another flavor then go back to another flavor for a month i'm kind of i'm kind of getting crazy right now i'll be you know i'd be even doing you know dip mixing up during the day you know lunch is gonna be some peanut butter dinner's gonna be some mint right we've got some food i'm over here close-minded not free thinking yeah i got strawberry i'm gonna stick with strawberry for about 25 years we'll adjust some other time down the road uh wah-wah for the drinks vitamin shop get all the stuff at the vitamin shop awesome jockofuel.com what commissary oh that's right navy commissary that's right that's right good call kdog 100 we're in there man we're in there um jackalful.com if you yeah also subscribe if you subscribe you get the shipping for free what up just where do we stand on greens okay we have we have greens choco greens um they're amazing dude they are amazing they really truly are amazing yes they are they are they're hard to make um if you look at the ingredients list it's all organic the whole product together is not certified organic because we haven't gone through that process yet but every ingredient in there is i think every ingredient is organic so it's it's hard to make it um so that's why i'm not talking about it a ton because people that are kind of in the know like i'm not trying to screw them and just tell everyone that this is the greatest beverage yeah it's certainly it certainly is the greatest greens but and not even close it's not even close it tastes delicious go look at the ingredients list too it is the best quality sweetened with monk fruit it you know what i've been doing is i've been having that like let let's because sometimes you know i get done with the steak at night and i want dessert but i'm full so that milk is sort of looking like a little bit much out comes the grease out comes the greens it's like what like uh wine people they drink whatever it is a port right a poor can i get glass of pork when i'm feeling that way since i'm a freaking savage i'm just ordering up a class a glass of greens shaking up the ground shaking some green i brought it up and i don't want to alienate the the listeners who maybe don't have access and and you can edit all the stuff out if if no people have access but here's the deal on the greens you want to go back to the three categories of leaders which is the fully anticipates the outcome you're shocked by the outcome and can't process the outcome when i drank my first container of greens i was squarely in category c like what is happening the delta between what i expected and what i got it was insane those things are it is unbelievable how good they taste for what you think it's gonna taste like because it's greens it was an absolute mind-blowing experience well i've been doing it in the morning and it does give you like a little bit of kick right that other kick and it's just good to go so yeah listen if you if you go online you order the greens awesome if if we're out we're making more as fast as we can i apologize logistics wins wars um we're working it we're losing that war right now we're we're in the game and we'll try and get you some more that's like the kind of thing you want to subscribe to because you want that order getting filled it's so good don't want to be waiting when are you drinking it dave every morning it's like in the morning so just immediately into my habit pattern i haven't since i got it i haven't missed a day it was it it's everything you just said i just want people to realize like what you think you're getting with greens like everybody knows what greens are cool they're healthy you sort of need to stomach them and just kind of like hold your nose and and get to them because they're good for you yeah go to your lawn mower get the clippings out put it in the blender that's what you think you're getting right and you're not there the origin media team did this uh like double blind video like double blind study video from the immersion camp yeah and it's awesome man people are just like all day oh my gosh this is green it doesn't even it doesn't even compute that it can be that good for category c there you go speaking of origin we got uh geez rash guards apparel coming out of origin usa right yeah doing boots up there now yeah we're doing it all i'm gonna we're we're gonna make everything that we use in life that's the goal the goal is to make everything that we that we use in life and we're going to make it in america and let me tell you what that's a that's no small task and we're getting it done jeans boots we got work pants coming out i saw those on the ground i'll tell you what man that's another thing like we're going to make them as fast as we can as soon as people get a pair or see a pair they're they're going to be gone um and you know what we we're up in our capacity again logistics wins wars i know that and we are working it um and it's we're in a good place because the rest of people that do this they got to rely on a foreign supply chain even in some cases a communist supply chain with literally fabrics that are made by communists who you know have a dictatorship in their country and they're paying people you know one dollar a week to make the material so this is like uh strategic for america strategic for america that's why we're doing it could we hey could we freaking cut some corners and up that profit margin by whatever sure we could but we're freaking not going to so if you want some if you wear clothes [Music] then you might want to get your clothes from a strategic partner of yourself and that is us at origin usa what up i got nothing else for that man dirt to the shirt baby um we if you're also looking for clothes to say represent the path you can find those on jocko store junkostore.com we got discipline equals freedom we got um take the high ground on there still um i like how you're co-opting some of echo's phrases you're kind of like you're you're you're utilizing them you know not totally uh copying them 100 but you're you're catching the vibe and you're putting your k-dog spin on it just been watching the master work from the corner of the camera shout out echo charles um yeah man so got all that going on at jacostore.com also have a t-shirt subscription from the big dog echo charles called the shirt locker where he makes rad um shirts with layers from the podcast so if you're if you're about those layers if you listen to the podcast you're like yes like i'm about the layers check out the shirt locker echoes cranking out a new shirt every month with a different layer from the podcast presented on them both of you are wearing dude let's try the shirt right now check it out the sock t-shirt we represent right we we come here to to get after it and we're representing that right and so me and echo like sometimes show up wearing the same shirt today me dave burke showed up rocking the um sog shirt which is legit the socks support so echo showed it to me he's like he's approved for and i said hey man we can't be running around just throwing sog on to a t-shirt and being good with that any more than you can just throw a trident on a shirt and be like oh yeah i'll just represent so the way we got around that is by putting support on there so it's like you know like when if you're if you're maybe you support a local biker gang but you're not in the biker gang but you got friends you can wear that biker gang stuff but you gotta have support on there because you're not trying to claim at all you don't wanna try to claim sock but we freaking support songs 100 100 absolutely um so all that's going on at uh jocko store.com yeah uh subscribe to this podcast wherever you subscribe to podcast we also have jocko unraveling and that's with daryl cooper dc we just did one about afghanistan that was kind of the lead up to this one a little bit just because we were debriefing what happened on afghanistan and and clearly there's some military incompetence that has risen up in the ranks and we started to address that on on jocko unraveling with daryl cooper got the grounded podcast which we haven't done a while and warrior kid podcast i know i got to get back on that one so subscribe to those check them out also we have jocko underground jocko underground.com we have a a secondary podcast where like i started off talking today about how we talk about psych psychology on that one quite a bit um because that stuff interests me and that stuff also helps you understand the world and if you understand the world and you understand people you can be a better leader you can be a better person you can be a better mom dad whatever yet it didn't quite some of those subjects don't quite fit into this podcast so we made jocko underground documentaryground.com and that's that podcast is like a little reward for support because we wanted to create a alternative and alternative platform in case of these platforms which they haven't caused any problems yet hey we're on board we're here we appreciate it we appreciate the platforms but you can't put all your reliance on something that you have no control over and we don't really have any control over these large platforms so we wanted to make something just in case hey we'll be here but just in case things get wild we got the jocko underground.com so thanks if you want to subscribe to that cost eight dollars and eighteen cents a month if you can't afford that look we still want you in the game email assistance jockowunderground.com appreciate that we got a youtube channel where we put up this video you can see the new song underground or sog shirt locker t-shirts on there which is cool subscribe to that and also origin usa if you want to watch what's going on at origin strategic partner of america you can go to origin usa check that out psychological warfare made an album telling echo helping echo charles get through some moments of weakness maybe he needs one for you know coming to work definitely check out psychological warfare very legit though uh flip side canvas dakota meyer if you wanna hang cool stuff on your wall check that out books new book coming out final spin dave what's your assessment read it it's so good and stand by for the audiobook there's some oh yeah so on the audio if you get the audio book of that i read the audiobook and then we did dave and i did uh about an hour conversation about just a review talking about the characters the character development the lack of character development the plot development the lack of plot development the words used the lack of words used just all these things that uh will will definitely be interesting and it's it's been amazing so far the books the books coming out you should do like a virtual book signing or something would be cool to get that out there i think i am doing a virtual book signing and i'm not 100 sure where and and actually check this out speaking of virtual book signing in november i'm going to do two jocko lives jocko lives ready one in looks like san diego california in november and then austin texas in november i think those are the only dates look things are wild right now with the the covid and the protocols and all this stuff and people are really sketched out especially some of the some of the places you can give you can do these events some of them have whatever they're freaked out about it so we found some places that are down for the cause so we're gonna do a gig i'm gonna do a gig jocko live november in san diego and november in austin texas so keep an eye out for that it'll be an intro to final spin it gives you time to read it the book does not take long to read so you'll be able to get the book get the book when it comes out november 9th and then by the time november 13th or november 20th which i think are the dates on those two i'll be there and you can ask me questions about it i'll talk about some of uh some of where all that came from the darkness in my brain uh that's final spin leadership strategies and tactics field manual the code the evaluation the protocols discipline equals freedom field manual way of the warrior kid one two three four miking the dragons about faced by hackworth extreme ownership and the dichotomy of leadership check out these books if you like books if you don't like books get the audio books that's my recommendation echelon front we have a leadership consultancy leadership is the solution what's the problem the leadership is the solution well what's the problem leadership is the solution that's what i'm trying to tell you and that's what we will tell you and that's what we will teach you at echelonfranco ashlandfront.com look if you want to come to one of our live events the next live event that we have is in las vegas the muster october 28th and 29th two days it was a deep dive into this information we also have field training exercises and we have a thing called ef battlefield where we go and tour battlefields check out all that stuff go to events at echelonfront.com if you want us to come work with your company same thing um we also have an online training academy called extreme ownership academy extremeownership.com this is this stuff is not easy and you don't get good at it by reading a book and be like oh cool i'm good to go it doesn't work that way you need to work at it continually go to extremeownership.com come and ask me a question on there i'm literally live how long are we on there for today an hour and a half yeah hour and 20 minutes i guess yeah dave and i are responding to your questions life is on there jamie's on there like we are there jp's on there you want to ask us a question come and ask a question live and it's not crowded you will get your question answered how's that extremeownership.com if you want to help service members active and retired their families gold star families check out mark lee's mom mama lee she's got a charity organization she is helping all kinds of people get through all kinds of struggles go to america's mightywarriors.org if you want to check that out and if you want more of my lengthy lectures which today was absolutely one of them you want you want to hear carries chiming in you want to hear dave's analytical appraisals you can find us on the interwebs on twitter on the gram on facebook echo is that echo charles but he's not here today so don't follow him instead check out k-dog what is it k-dog carrie helton carrie underscore hilton you couldn't get carrie no underscore helton i tried i hit the guy up and everything no response he denied you oh you were trying to make that social media move 100 percent man give me my name bro is he is his name carrie helton too yeah yeah all one word and uh yeah i shot a message i was like you know very civil hey dude uh we you know interested in your handle is that something i could get off you he's like that's my name bro no response dude yeah scene left me on red it hurts but you can find me at carrie underscore left me on red left me on red so had read the message and just so my kids harass me because i do that in real life like they're talking and i just don't respond they walk away and they say oh you're going to leave me on red wow yep nice and i i think i do that fairly regularly i mean you've done it to me dave can you relate to this i left you on red before i try not to interact too much [Laughter] but sure actually actually you just sent me i was like stupid busy over the last few days and you i i i just remember that you sent me some texts that were absolutely left unread uh and then dave burke at david r burke um and look thanks to all the men and women out there right now in the army navy air force marines who are competent leaders who are holding the line in a violent and unpredictable world and also thanks to our competent police and law enforcement firefighters paramedics emts dispatchers correctional officers border patrol secret service all first responders you have an incredibly difficult job but you keep us safe and we appreciate it and everyone else out there open up your mind don't be the person that is loathed to accept contrary evidence to what you already believe don't be that person don't get stuck in that rut open your mind free your mind and become better by continuing to always absorb new information in fact look for it seek it out and keep getting after it and until next time this is dave and carrie and out

Channel: Jocko Podcast

Views: 196,156

Keywords: jocko willink, podcast, discipline, defcor, fredom, leadership, extreme ownership, author, navy seal, usa, military, echelon front, dichotomy of leadership, jiu jitsu, bjj, mma, jocko, victory, echo charles, flixpoint

Id: Sh027enkGkk

Length: 173min 27sec (10407 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 14 2021